Traffic piling up at Port Canaveral with space industry vessels

Traffic piling up at Port Canaveral with space industry vessels

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The arrival this week of Blue Origin’s new rocket landing support ship marks a busy time for Port Canaveral as government and private maritime ship traffic begins to pick up steam.

Jeff Bezos’ company is gearing up for the first launch of its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket and what Blue Origin has been calling landing platform vessel 1 (LPV1) arrived Wednesday with the company’s blue feather logo painted on its flat surface along with the official name, “Jaklyn,” which is in deference to Bezos’ mother.

It pulled up along North Cargo Berth 6 adjacent Blue Origin’s massive crane that will be used to eventually pluck the recovered first stage of New Glenn off the ship.

It’s the same area where SpaceX’s fleet of droneships and other vessels park during their regular recovery operations and signals the beginning of what will begin to become crowded space at the port.

Earlier this week, the port also hosted the Space Perspective MV Voyager ship, which took advantage of one of the port’s mobile harbor cranes to place a capsule that will someday be used on space balloon flights by the company.

Port Canaveral's Mobile Harbor Crane 2 lifts the capsule that will be used for Space Perspective's space balloon flights onto the company's MV Voyager ship on Sunday, Sept. 1, 2024. (Courtesy/Port Canaveral)
Port Canaveral’s Mobile Harbor Crane 2 lifts the capsule that will be used for Space Perspective’s space balloon flights onto the company’s MV Voyager ship on Sunday, Sept. 1, 2024. (Courtesy/Port Canaveral)

That ship doesn’t stay at the port ,like SpaceX and Blue Origin vessels, but will need to come in and out as the space tourism company gets up and running.

Space Perspective builds its balloons that are the size of a football field at a new factory in Titusville.

They will be used to take tourists up to the edge of space for a six-hour trip up to 100,000 feet in altitude that will give travelers a view of the curvature of the planet and the blackness of space.

Originally the balloons were going to launch from land, but the company shifted to the use of the MV Voyager.

Also this week, the port saw the passage of a unique European Space Agency transport vessel called the Canopée, a French sail-assisted freighter normally used to transport ArianeGroup rockets to the ESA launch site in South America, but on Tuesday it arrived with the European Service Module slated to be used on the Artemis III mission to the moon.

More Artemis supplies arrived on NASA’s Pegasus barge on Thursday including items for Artemis II, III and IV.

The core stage boat-tail for Artemis III and the core stage engine section for Artemis IV were loaded onto the barge Aug. 28 at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. They joined the launch vehicle stage adapter for Artemis II that was place on board one week earlier when the barge was parked at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

This is the second Pegasus trip to KSC of late after having delivered the Artemis II core stage in July.

United Launch Alliance has also been busy with its RocketShip transport delivering Vulcan Centaur stages to Cape Canaveral twice in August for upcoming national security launches.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to send out and bring back in its pair of droneships for Falcon 9 launch recovery operations. It will continue to do both crew and cargo Dragon recovery off the coast of Florida and into the port early into next year before shifting Dragon landings back to California.

The space industry’s maritime needs have been making headlines at the port, which last month pulled back from an earlier decision to build out a new cruise terminal on the north side after complaints from state officials that it was threatening the needs of space interests in favor of the more profitable cruise business.

Study offers $2.1B plan to make room for SpaceX, other rocket company fleets at Port Canaveral

The port has been juggling the needs of those along with cargo, commercial fishing and recreation — and the port is getting full.

Space Florida, the state’s aerospace finance and development authority, released a study earlier this year that recommended a $2.1 billion, multiyear expansion in a different part of the north side of the port to support the space industry’s needs.

This year could see more than 100 launches, mostly from SpaceX, with the majority running recovery efforts for first-stage boosters, fairings and capsules.

“We’re running out of space,” Port Canaveral CEO Capt. John Murray said in an interview with the Sentinel earlier this year. “Last week, we had two boosters in for SpaceX. They had vessels at berth five, berth six and berth eight. Three berths at the port knocked out of service.”

The Space Florida report cites that the Space Coast could handle close to 200 launch and recovery missions annually by 2028, a number forecast to balloon to more than 1,250 missions in the next five decades.

Space Florida’s study talked with SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Relativity Space, The Spaceport Company, Space Perspective, ABL Space Systems, Vaya Space, Phantom Space, Stoke Space and Astra in gathering industry needs for marine vessel recovery operations.

The study projects SpaceX will be joined by five more rocket-launching companies in just the next three years.

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