“It’s hard to describe how epic this recovery was after our first Falcon 9 launch failure,” Koenigsman said.
As he, Musk and others marveled at the sight of the sooty rocket glowing with floodlights under a dark, starry sky, they wondered whether the moment could ever be captured.
“It felt very heavy.”
He was also very enthusiastic at Hawthorn. As the rocket touched down, a crowd of workers gathered on the factory floor just outside Mission Control began shouting, “USA! USA! USA!” There was a huge celebration.
And why not?
SpaceX’s four thousand employees had accomplished nothing short of a miracle in the six months leading up to that night. The company worked on four separate, huge projects in parallel, and packed its final tests into a single launch. The company’s return to flight missions aboard a Falcon 9 rocket in late December included a significant upgrade to the full thrust version, an unprecedented oxygen concentration program, and the first landing. They saved Christmas to boot.
The historic ORBCOMM launch and landing provided one of the most emotional and breathtaking moments in SpaceX history. I do not believe that it is possible to overstate the importance. With its fortunes on the line, the company recovered from a catastrophic and financially devastating failure. And, in that same flight, SpaceX accomplished something that no company or country had ever done before. By then, SpaceX was following in the footsteps of NASA and others in launching rockets, flying satellites into space and landing spacecraft in water. Certainly, it did so in cheap and innovative ways. But these were very well-worn paths. No one had ever launched an orbital rocket and landed it back on Earth after a few minutes.
Till that night.
Catriona Chambers came to SpaceX in early 2005 as an electronics engineer. Within a few months on the job, he assumed responsibility for the Merlin engine computer on the Falcon 1 rocket. On the first launch of that little rocket, there was a sensor that measured atmospheric pressure. After reaching space, the first stage will descend back to Earth, and when sensors detect dense atmosphere, it will order parachute deployment. He and everyone who worked on the rocket knew this was absurd. The rocket would likely never survive, and the parachute would be practically useless. But Musk pushed hard for reusability from SpaceX’s beginning. Now here she was, almost eleven years later, watching it actually happen. As director of avionics, he watched the first stage land with his team, feeling the significance of history as he hugged and high-fived his friends.
<a href