BROWNSVILLE — SpaceX plans to install two massive ground station antennas at Boca Chica beach for the purpose of tracking manned space flights, though not flights from Boca Chica, at least not yet.
The 86-ton antennas will be used to track flights of the crewed version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral to the International Space Station, probably in 2017.
The Hawthorne, Calif.-based company acquired the antennas from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
The company already has made multiple cargo runs between Earth awnd ISS using its uncrewed Dragon capsules, driven into space by the company’s Falcon 9 rockets.
In 2012, SpaceX became the first private company to rendezvous with ISS.
SpaceX and Boeing both have contracts to fly crews to ISS. Since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, NASA has depended on Russian Soyuz flights to get astronauts to ISS.
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