Wichita company behind SpaceX rocket’s legs

A Wichita company was part of the successful landing of SpaceX’s 15-story Falcon rocket booster Monday night in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Leading Edge Aerospace, 1360 S. Anna, manufactures the more than three-story-long tooling to produce the booster’s landing legs.

“We’ve actually been doing work for SpaceX for a number of years,” Ben Johnson, Leading Edge’s lead administrator and quality manager, said Tuesday. “We’ve done quite a few tools for them.”

The SpaceX mission sent 11 small satellites to orbit Monday night — its first mission since a June accident that destroyed a supply ship headed for the International Space Station.

The mission was the first time an unmanned rocket returned to land vertically at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Johnson estimates Leading Edge has produced 20 to 30 tools for Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, a 13-year-old company led by billionaire Elon Musk that aims to develop reusable rockets to drive down the cost of space travel.

He said Leading Edge’s business relationship with SpaceX came about through a former Spirit AeroSystems engineer it used to work with, who went to work for SpaceX.

The landing leg tooling was designed by Leading Edge, Johnson said, and is its most significant contribution to SpaceX.

“This is the biggest one, the highest-profile part,” he said.

The 37-foot-long by 7-foot-wide triangular tooling “kind of looks like a speedboat hull,” Johnson said.

Leading Edge was founded in 1998 by owner and president Stan Unruh.

Its customers include Spirit and Textron Aviation Cessna. Its work has included manufacturing the major tooling for Textron AirLand’s Scorpion tactical jet.

Contributing: Associated Press

This story was originally published December 22, 2015 at 11:03 AM with the headline "Wichita company behind SpaceX rocket’s legs."