The Falcon 9 Booster, which launched four astronauts into orbit last weekend, returned to the Florida Space Coast on a previous SpaceX drone ship Thursday, departing for Port Canaveral with exactly the ports but otherwise it looked good, because It apparently slipped towards the deck of the ship in high winds. Rough siege.
Assuming no major problems are revealed in the post-flight investigation, SpaceX aims to reuse Booster, the next crew to fly the Dragon mission from March 30, marking the first SpaceX crew mission to fly with a reused Falcon 9 booster.
The brand new 15-story tall booster landed on a SpaceX drone ship around nine-and-a-half minutes after a lift after a flight from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Sunday night. Live video of the landing ship Falcon 9 appears in the first stage – designated B1061 – sitting square down on the deck of the ship more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Falcon 9 boosters make a propulsive landing by re-ruling the rocket’s center engine in a braking maneuver before the touchdown.
By the time the rocket reached Port Canaveral on Thursday, the booster had lean and one of its four landing legs appeared to be extending along the deck of the ship. Another landing foot landed next to the deck, while SpaceX’s “Oct Ktagraber” robot device secured the booster for a trip to the Florida coast.
In an effort to reduce costs, SpaceX has regularly flown Falcon 9 boosters previously used on commercial satellite missions since 2017. The company also says that reusing the boosters makes the Falcon 9 more reliable, but U.S. government customers have been slow to sign up for missions flying from previously flying rocket hardware.
U.S. The Space Force agreed earlier this year to start using the reusable SpaceX booster with national security launches, and NASA plans to do the same on crew missions starting next year.
The four astronauts, launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, flew on the International Space Station on SpaceX’s first operational crew rotation flight. The mission, known as Crew-1, was followed by Crew Dragon’s first piloted test flight to the space station earlier this year.
NASA and SpaceX agreed to use a booster from the Crew-1 launch for the next Crew Dragon flight, known as Crew-2.
While there is no indication that the booster’s lean reuse for crew-2 missions will affect its ability, NASA has other options available if needed.
“We have a backup in case something happens at this particular stage, but we’ve made all our observations at this stage,” said Kathy Luders, associate administrator at NASA’s Directorate of Human Research and Operations. “We are all done. We understand hardware. So we really want to use it because it makes the task easier for Crew-2. “
The backup booster for the A-2 mission will be SpaceX and the Falcon 9 booster that NASA will be able to use, launching the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich oceanography satellite from California. That launch is scheduled for Saturday, and the booster will return to the onshore landing facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base shortly after takeoff.
“There are a lot of other people out there,” Lloyders said. “The good thing about SpaceX is that there are a lot of hardware out there that we can use.”
Below are more pics of the Falcon 9 booster returning to Port Canaveral on Thursday.
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