On Dec. 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That night, just days before Christmas, the company successfully landed the first stage for the first time. The story behind this remarkable achievement is nowhere more fully told than in the book Reentry, authored by Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and published in 2024. To mark the tenth anniversary, Ars is reprinting a slightly condensed chapter from the book that tells the inside story of this landing. The chapter begins in June 2015 with a tragedy, the disintegration of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the CRS-7 cargo supply mission for NASA. It was the first time a Falcon 9 had been lost in flight.
Seconds after the Dragon-bearing Falcon 9 rocket broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, David Giger shouted into his headset, “Dragon is alive!”
In the decade since he joined the company straight out of graduate school, Giger had taken on management of the entire Dragon program, reporting directly to Elon Musk. He watched the CRS-7 launch from mission control in Hawthorne not with a particular role, but rather providing a leadership presence. Giger could sense the Dragon mission team, mostly younger engineers, freeze up as video showed debris from the rocket showering back to Earth. A lot of the people involved in the hairy early flights of Dragon, including the C2 mission in 2012, had moved on to other positions at SpaceX or departed.
“They were a great team, but I think everyone assumed it was over,” Giger said. Unlike a lot of his colleagues, Giger had endured some trying times at SpaceX, including three failures of the Falcon 1 rocket. After the Falcon 9 shattered, Giger noticed that Dragon continued to send data back. It had separated from the rocket and was flying some thirty miles above the Atlantic Ocean.
The key to saving Dragon was opening its parachutes before it got too close to the ground. SpaceX had not anticipated such a contingency, nor planned to send commands to Dragon as it rode on the Falcon 9 rocket. But in an emergency, the Dragon control center could talk to Dragon using ground-based antennas. So controllers in California frantically worked to configure this communications system and command the two drogue parachutes to open. These are the small, precursor parachutes that stabilize the vehicle prior to deployment of Dragon’s three main parachutes.
The command was sent, but nothing happened. Dragon continued to dive.
For about two minutes after the rocket’s breakup, the plucky spacecraft faithfully relayed data. Then, less than a mile above the ocean, below the horizon from the Florida coast, the data stopped. The spacecraft and its 4,000 pounds of cargo plunged into the sea.