SpaceX at the cape, 2010 to 2020
SpaceX's Falcon 9 first flew from Cape Canaveral on June 4, 2010. In December 2015 a first stage landed back at the cape, the Falcon Heavy followed in 2018, and on May 30, 2020, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first astronauts launched from Florida since the Shuttle.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 made its first launch from Cape Canaveral on June 4, 2010, according to the Space Force’s table of first launches on the Eastern Range. It joined a list that runs back to Bumper in 1950 and through Redstone, Atlas, Titan and Delta. The table counted 130 Falcon 9 launches through May 2022, and the Space Force notes that most of the boosters were reused, so the count of launches is not a count of rockets.
Landing back at the cape
The first stages started coming back. On December 21, 2015, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at 8:29 p.m. with Orbcomm communications satellites, and nine minutes later its first stage made the first successful landing of a Falcon 9 booster, at Landing Zone 1 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, according to the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing. The landing zone was formerly Launch Complex 13, one of the cape’s early Atlas pads. In April 2016 another landed at sea on a drone ship after launching a cargo mission, CRS-8, to the International Space Station.
Falcon Heavy
The Falcon Heavy made its first launch on February 6, 2018, the Space Force’s table shows. Not every SpaceX flight on the Eastern Range leaves from the Air Force station itself: the crewed Dragon flights went from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the pad that launched Apollo 11 and the first and last Shuttle missions.
Astronauts again
On May 30, 2020, at 3:22 p.m. EDT, a Falcon 9 carrying a Crew Dragon lifted off from Launch Complex 39A with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard. It was the first launch of astronauts on the Crew Dragon and the Falcon 9 and a test flight for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. NASA marked it as the first time since the Space Shuttle’s last flight in 2011 that American astronauts had launched on an American rocket from American soil. Hurley had flown on that last Shuttle mission, STS-135. The Shuttle years are on our Shuttle page.
Further Reading
- Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree
Sources
- Space Launch Delta 45, Assured Access to Space: heritage book (2022), launch firsts table
- 45th Space Wing, "45th Space Wing successfully launches ORBCOMM; historically lands first stage booster" (December 2015)
- NASA, "NASA Astronauts Launch from America in Historic Test Flight of SpaceX Crew Dragon" (May 30, 2020)
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