Port Canaveral commissioners approve 5-year lease for SpaceX facility

PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. — Commissioners in Port Canaveral approved a 5-year lease agreement with SpaceX Wednesday to use a facility in the city to refurbish its rockets.

The lease will cost SpaceX $400,000 a year, officials said.

The company has been operating out of Port Canaveral for several months and has already started work on renovating the facility where it plans to process rockets for reuse in the future.

The 53,000-square-foot facility will be key to SpaceX’s future operations, senior director for Launch Operations Ricky Lim said.

“The facility is going to be a place where we process and store rocket stages and so a big part of the missing, the long-term vision for SpaceX, is that we reuse our vehicles,” he said.

A mission planned for later in the month could illustrate how important the reusable rockets are to SpaceX as, for the first time, a previously flown first-stage will be reused to deliver a communications satellite to orbit from the Kennedy Space Center.

The first-stage rocket component was launched in April on a resupply mission to the International Space Station.

The rocket then landed on a floating barge a few hundred miles off shore.

The rocket was refurbished in Texas and SpaceX said the facility in Port Canaveral will enable it to attain its goal of full- and rapid-rocket reusability.

Cox Media Group