SpaceX Dragon recovery will return to the West Coast for good

SpaceX announced last week that the company will be moving its Dragon recovery operations to the West Coast of the United States due to trunk debris surviving reentry, even though computer models said it wouldn’t. This will be a return to form as the company started out recovering its Dragons from California.

Back in 2022, a piece of a SpaceX Dragon trunk section wound up on a farm in the Australian mountains. It was believed to be from the Crew-1 mission that returned home over a year earlier.

SpaceX’s Dragon trunk is supposed to burn up during reentry as the rest of the Dragon splashes down off the coast of Florida for recovery. However, the recovery of debris and new analysis shows that debris from the trunk section regularly makes it down to Earth’s surface, so SpaceX has decided to change its dragon splashdown plans.

Over the next year, SpaceX will begin transitioning its Dragon recovery operations from Cape Canaveral, Florida to the Port of Long Beach in California. SpaceX operates both land and sea assets for the safe recovery of both crew and cargo from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, but also has a host of employees dedicated to these missions. All of this will have to eventually be moved to California.

The company is hiring new recovery positions in California, training will take place in Florida but eventually new hires will be permanently placed on the West Coast for operations.

SpaceX is also working on a software change that will better mitigate where Dragon trunk debris lands, preferably up range in the ocean, with detaching the trunk after Dragon’s deorbit burn.

A return to form

This is not the first time SpaceX has operated Dragon recovery operations from the West Coast. The V1 Dragons used for NASA’s first Commercial Resupply Services contract all splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

It wasn’t until the introduction of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Dragon 2 spacecraft that the company moved all recovery operations to Florida.

With the switch back over to the West Coast, SpaceX believes all of Dragon’s debris will reenter over the ocean, safe from any potential danger of it reentering over land.