SpaceX Falcon 9 booster arrives at Port Canaveral hours after Atlas V launch
Emre Kelly
The Space Coast lived up to its name Sunday morning thanks to the compressed appearances of two rockets – one departure, one arrival.
Just hours after a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket took flight from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage that boosted a communications satellite from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday sailed into Port Canaveral on the company's Of Course I Still Love You drone ship.
Following in the wake of Royal Caribbean and Carnival cruise ships, the booster's arrival at the port just after sunrise marked an end to its mission, which took a commercial satellite for Colorado-based EchoStar and Luxembourg-based SES to orbit from pad 39A. The charred first stage stood 162 feet tall, but 6 feet of that height was due to the deployed landing legs.
The mission, labeled EchoStar 105 / SES-11, marked another milestone for SpaceX – it was the company's third successful launch of a previously flown Falcon 9, all of which have resulted in drone ship landings. The booster first vaulted a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station on the tenth Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA, or CRS-10, in February.
About four hours earlier at 3:28 a.m., a nearly 200-foot-tall Atlas V rocket with side-strapped solid rocket boosters leapt off the pad at Launch Complex 41 with a secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, marking ULA's final Space Coast mission of the year. The joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin is expected to take flight again from Cape Canaveral in January.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is targeting late October for its next launch – one of at least two more for the year.
Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook at @EmreKelly.
[On 5th try, Atlas V blasts off from Cape Canaveral with spy satellite]
[First four engines for NASA's Space Launch System ready to rumble]
[Brevard County residents can score discounted KSC tickets with donation]
[Out-of-this world Halloween party coming to Kennedy Space Center]