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A bit of America’s space history is now on the ocean’s floor. During its return voyage to Port Canaveral in Central Florida, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage booster toppled over and broke in half.
This particular booster, tail number B1058, was getting back from its record-breaking nineteenth mission when it had its fatal fall. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Dec. 23 carrying 23 Starlink satellites. The booster made a successful landing eight and a half minutes after launch on the drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions’ which was stationed east of the Bahamas. SpaceX said in an announcement on social media that it succumbed to “high winds and waves.”
The corporate stated that “Newer Falcon boosters have upgraded landing legs with the aptitude to self-level and mitigate this sort of issue.
In a separate post, Kiko Deontchev, the Vice President of Launch for SpaceX, elaborated by added that while they “mostly outfitted” the remaining of the operational Falcon booster fleet, B1058 was left because it was, “given its age.” The rocket “met its fate when it hit intense wind and waves leading to failure of a partially secured [octo-grabber] lower than 100 miles from home.”
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“We got here up with self-leveling legs that immediately equalize leg loads on landing after experiencing a severe tippy booster two years ago on Christmas,” Deontchev wrote, referring to the primary flight of the B1069 booster.
“One thing is obviously, we’ll make lemonade out of lemons and learn as much as possible from historic 1058 on our path to aircraft-like operations,” he added.
An American tail(number)
Beyond its status because the flight leader in SpaceX’s Falcon fleet with 19 accomplished missions, B1058 also held the excellence of launching astronauts from American soil for the primary time because the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
Former NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were the primary to climb aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly to the International Space Station on May 30, 2020. That historic mission, dubbed Demo-2, began the illustrious mission profession of B1058 that spanned greater than three years.
To mark its landmark flight, the booster was emblazoned with each the official NASA logos, nicknamed the “meatball” and the “worm.” This became the primary crewed flight in NASA’s Industrial Crew Program, which began a brand new chapter of the agency purchasing industrial services to Shepard astronauts to and from the orbiting outpost.
When the booster was being prepared for the Demo-2 mission, NASA and SpaceX determined the loss-of-crew (LOC) probability to be 1-in-276, beating the program-required threshold of 1-in-270.
Crew Dragon Endeavor docked with the ISS 19 hours after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
While the Demo-2 flight was the one crewed mission using B1058, the booster did support one additional mission to the Space Station when it launched a Cargo Dragon spacecraft, designated C208, on SpaceX’s twenty first Industrial Resupply Services (CRS-21) mission on Dec. 6, 2020.
The opposite 17 flights of this booster included the primary and third of SpaceX’s Transporter missions, carrying an array of CubeSats and NanoSats to orbit, in addition to 14 missions to send up satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink web constellation.
Gone, but not forgotten
On Tuesday, Dec. 26, the remaining portion of B1058 was brought into Port Canaveral onboard the droneship, “Just Read the Instructions.” A group of photographers, reporters and on-lookers gathered along the entryway to the port to catch a glimpse of what was left of the booster.
A lot of the engine section of the rocket seemed to be in tact, judging from photos and three of the 4 landing legs jutted into the air, propped open as they were following the booster’s landing.
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Looking from the highest of the booster remnants, wires were drawn out and strewn over the sting of the droneship, dragging within the water because the vessel made it back to its dock.
While B1058 won’t ever fly again, SpaceX fully intends to preserve what’s left and understand what they will.
“We’re planning to salvage the engines and do life leader inspections on the remaining hardware,” said Jon Edwards, the Vice President of Launch Vehicles and Falcon 9 Product Director at SpaceX. “There remains to be quite a little bit of value on this booster. We is not going to let it go to waste.”