SpaceX is moving its Dragon spacecraft splashdowns from off the coast of Florida to the West Coast starting next year, Long Beach city officials said Sunday.
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“Excited to share a Space Beach update! Long Beach will be the new home to @SpaceX’s Dragon recovery vessel as their West Coast Recovery Operations team based out of the @portoflongbeach will welcome back both @NASA and other private astronauts who are returning to Earth from orbit and beyond,” Mayor Rex Richardson said Sunday on X, formerly Twitter.
“We’ll continue sharing updates as #SpaceBeach continues to soar!”
The Hawthorne-based company said the move is intended to reduce risks associated with re-entering debris from the spacecraft’s trunk section.
The trunk section of the Dragon has been released before the de-orbit burn, re-entering the atmosphere several weeks or even months later. SpaceX officials believed that the trunk would break up on re-entry with no debris surviving, but on several occasions pieces of debris from Dragon trunks have landed in Australia, Saskatchewan and North Carolina, among other places.
SpaceX engineering teams have explored a variety of solutions to eliminate the risk of trunk debris landing on populated areas.
“After careful review and consideration of all potential solutions … SpaceX teams concluded the most effective path forward is to return to West Coast recovery operations,” the company said in a statement Friday.
“To accomplish this, SpaceX will implement a software change that will have Dragon execute its deorbit burn before jettisoning the trunk, similar to our first 21 Dragon recoveries,” the statement continued.
“Moving trunk separation after the deorbit burn places the trunk on a known reentry trajectory, with the trunk safely splashing down uprange of the Dragon spacecraft off the coast of California. SpaceX is working with NASA, the FAA, and other federal agencies to evaluate and assess all potential return locations off the coast of California to ensure safe and reliable Dragon splashdowns on the West Coast.
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” … To support these changes, a Dragon recovery vessel will move to the Pacific, where we will utilize existing SpaceX facilities in the Port of Long Beach to support initial post-flight work and operations on Dragon. Post-splashdown, crew and cargo will transit to California ahead of their final destinations, such as Houston, Texas or Cape Canaveral, Florida. Dragon refurbishment will continue to primarily take place at our Dragon processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare the Dragon spacecraft for its next flight.”
Earlier this month, SpaceX owner Elon Musk said he will be moving the aerospace company from Hawthorne to Texas in protest of a state law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that prevents California schools from notifying parents if their children identify as transgender.
Musk later announced that he would also move the headquarters of X —which he also owns — out of San Francisco and into Austin, Texas.
SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, has been a revolutionary force in the space industry, pioneering the re-use of multimillion-dollar rocket boosters to dramatically cut the cost of aerospace missions. The company has earned multiple contracts from NASA for conducting resupply missions to the International Space Station, and transporting astronauts to and from the orbiting outpost with its Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX is also working with NASA as part of the ambitious Artemis program aimed at establishing a base on the moon, with the larger goal of using the base as a possible launch point for manned missions to Mars.
SpaceX already has significant operations in Texas, where it developing its massive Starship vehicle — billed as the most powerful rocket ever flown — for use in the Artemis program and human/cargo missions to Mars.
Musk announced in 2021 that he was moving his Tesla electric-vehicle company to Austin, however, the company still has manufacturing facilities in Northern California, along with research and development facilities.
