“It's hard to describe how epic this comeback was after our first Falcon 9 launch failed,” said Koenigsmann.
As he, Musk and the others marveled at that sooty rocket, illuminated by spotlights under a dark starry sky, they must have wondered if this moment could ever be eclipsed.
“It just felt so huge.”
They were pretty excited in Hawthorne too. As the rocket landed, hordes of workers crammed into the factory floor just outside mission control began chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” A noisy celebration followed.
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 in parallel on four separate, massive projects, packing the final exams into a single launch. Aboard the Falcon 9 rocket at the end of December were the company's return mission, a significant upgrade to the Full Thrust version, an unprecedented oxygen densification program and the first landing. They saved Christmas, to boot.
ORBCOMM's historic launch and landing delivered one of the most cathartic and breathtaking moments in SpaceX history. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate its significance. With its fate hanging in the balance, the company roared back from a terrible and financially disastrous failure. And on the same flight, SpaceX accomplished something no company or country had ever done before. Until then, SpaceX had followed in the footsteps of NASA and others, launching rockets, flying satellites into space and landing spacecraft in water. Certainly, it did this in cheaper and innovative ways. But these were well-trodden paths. No one had ever launched an orbital rocket and landed back on Earth minutes later.
Until that night.
Catriona Chambers came to SpaceX in early 2005 as an electronics engineer. Within months, she took responsibility for the Merlin engine computer on the Falcon 1 rocket. On the very first launch of that little rocket, there was a sensor that measured atmospheric pressure. After reaching space, the first stage descended back to Earth, and when the sensor detected a thickening atmosphere it would command the deployment of a parachute. They and everyone who worked on the rocket knew this was ridiculous. The rocket would probably never survive and the parachute would be virtually useless. But Musk has pushed hard for reuse from the very beginning of SpaceX. Now here she was, almost eleven years later, seeing it actually happen. As director of avionics, she watched the first stage land with her team and felt the weight of history as she hugged and high-fived her friends.
