SpaceX Mr. Steven vessel with fairing capture arms.

A news report by Sandy Mazza in the Long Beach, California, Press-Telegram's online infosite reveals a futuristic grappling fighter-ship or an ocean-going Transformers’ Rescue Bot berthed at the waterfront in Los Angeles.

This strange-looking craft is actually a SpaceX ship that possesses four articulated arms that are almost as long as the boat deck itself, reaching upward like a giant claw.

“We do see a lot of bizarre stuff (on the waterfront) but that’s gotta be one of the stranger things around here,” said Steve Gilbert, yard foreman for neighboring U.S. Water Taxi & Port Services. “When it first pulled in, it didn’t have the arms and we just thought it was going to carry supplies.”

SpaceX leases land and adjacent berthing areas from the Port of Los Angeles for the firm's West Coast rocket-recovery operations along Miner and 22 streets in San Pedro, California. The leasehold is used to offload recovered Falcon 9 rocket parts and Dragon spacecraft, remove any leftover fuel or other hazardous materials, and prepare the equipment for transport.

The 205-foot-long vessel, named Mr. Steven, arrived at the site in late December and is now berthed behind Marmac 303, a barge used to land and carry SpaceX rocket boosters and spacecraft that have returned from their orbital missions. The modified claw-like ship is being used to salvage rocket nose-cones, or fairings, that are guided back to specific locations on Earth after missions, according to a Port of Los Angeles report.

To read the entire story, please access this direct Press-Telegram link...