SpaceX moving Dragon recovery to California waters

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft will take a new route home beginning next year after the company announced it will move its splashdowns back to the waters off California.

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said Sunday on X that the city’s port would be the new home for SpaceX’s recovery operations.

“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,” Richardson wrote.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced he is moving the headquarters of the Hawthorne-based SpaceX and the San Francisco-based X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, to Texas — citing several criticisms he has of California.

Moving the splashdown sites from off the Florida coast to California was necessary to address concerns over debris from Dragon that has crashed to Earth on previous missions.

The Dragon, which has carried astronauts and cargo into space on more than three dozen flights since 2012, has two main sections — the capsule that carries people and cargo, and an expendable part called the trunk.

In 2019, SpaceX moved the Dragon’s splashdowns from the West Coast to Florida, a move that allowed “teams to unpack and deliver critical cargo to NASA teams in Florida more efficiently and transport crews more quickly to Kennedy Space Center,” the company said in a statement on its website.

As part of that move, the company developed a new way of dealing with the trunk, detaching it from the capsule while it was still in orbit. Engineers calculated that the trunk would completely burn up as it fell from orbit and through the Earth’s atmosphere. However, pieces of the trunk have been found in Australia and elsewhere, forcing SpaceX back to the drawing board.

When splashdowns in the Pacific begin next year, the trunk will remain attached to the capsule until after the spacecraft has left orbit, allowing SpaceX to control its descent into the ocean away from land, the company said.

Phil Larson, a former SpaceX manager, said that it takes several dozen employees to handle splashdowns, so he didn’t expect the return to West Coast recoveries would have a big impact on local job creation, with some employees possibly deciding to remain in Florida.

“Folks can probably live in Florida and fly to L.A. for a week and fly back,” he said, noting the limited number of Dragon capsule flights.

Nevertheless, Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce President Jeremy Harris called the move “a big boon for Long Beach businesses and the area’s highly competitive aerospace industry.”