It's water -- fresh, not sea water. Since SpaceX's goal is to eventually make the Falcon 9 rocket reusable, they don't want to spray anything corrosive onto the rocket engines.
BTW, the Falcon 9 was just certified by the Air Force for military launches (story
here). So far, they have only been able to launch commercial satellites, re-supply missions to the space station, and two scientific satellites (one was for Canada). Their US competitor, United Launch Alliance, has had a monopoly on military missions until now. They also compete with the French Ariane 5 rocket and the Russian Proton rocket for commercial launches.