SpaceX successfully catches both fairing for the first time | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX successfully catches both fairing for the first time

engadget.com

168 pointsabakus54 comments

"Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, told reporters last year that the fairing costs around $6 million."

Pretty good if they can recover them and refurbish them. Could save a few million dollars per launch, even more if they can be re-used more than once.

Perhaps even more importantly, they are a big bottleneck on their flight rate. They require a massive autoclave (for curing the composites), and it wouldn't be practical to scale up their production significantly.

Even if it didn't save them a penny, my guess is it would still be a priority.

^ This.

The second stage (which is not reused on a Falcon 9), the fairings, and the grid fins are three of the longer lead time items for the Falcon series rockets. Reusing as much as possible helps keep their crazy launch cadence up.

FWIW, this isn't the first time they've caught the fairings, it is the first time they've caught both of them.

They've actually reflown 4 fairings now however a few of them they fished out of the ocean and had to do further inspections and refurbishing due to salt water corrosion.

Go to https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#reuse-fairings for some more info.

Dumb question I'm sure has been asked... we've been throwing stuff into the sea for awhile then going and picking it up later as it's bobbing gently in the waves. Why not just have some inflatable buoys that deploy in the water and have it float? Catching it seems pretty difficult, albeit pretty sweet.

I think the salt water even for brief periods even surrounded and raised up a few feet by bouys is a corrosive disaster. Maybe reusable a few times but not the long term solution if they want to reuse them 10's / 100's of times.

Perhaps their next move is to build another machine to spray some kind of rubber sealant foam on it, immediately after they capture it, in order to minimize and prevent the spray of ocean water and air, on the surface of the fairings.

Then, when it returns to land, someone can peel off the rubber sealant, do some quick quality control inspections, and authorize the fairing to be reused on its next launch.

or just have it land on a docking pad :)

My guess would be to avoid the salt water. NASA had to make significant changes to the Solid Rocket Boosters because they landed in the water[1].

[1]: https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/836

First: saltwater damage. Ever tried to run a car or a laptop or an airplane after it was dunked in saltwater? Hardening for saltwater immersion isn’t always practical and will always add some weight.

Second: They already do float. They recover them quickly (& sometimes reuse them) if they miss the catch. But the fairing halves are 800km down range. You need to have a boat nearby anyway, so might as well try to catch it before it lands in saltwater and screws it up.

It's not the water per say. A car, laptop or airplane that is in fresh water will not work without an overhaul.

The salt water produces corrosion that fresh does not. That is why military aircraft operated near the sea get washed so much. Both inside and out, including the engines.

We would come back from overwater flights over the Atlantic and either go through a 'bird bath' which is basically a car wash for aircraft. Or they would drag a fire hose out, hook it up and spray everything down. It was pretty cool to watch the exhaust gas temps when the started dumping fresh water into the engine inlet.

(Copy-pasting my own reply to a similar question below)

Salt water is the worst. It takes a lot of effort to clean it all off and it causes corrosion all the while. Even the ones that do hit water, they get them out as fast as they safely can.

As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), SpaceX have only reused previously-wet fairings on their own Starlink launches. They don't risk potentially damaged parts on external customers.

By catching the farings, SpaceX pockets $6m per launch. If they catch them, they can reuse them 5+ times. If they get dumped in the ocean, they might be able to use them a second time, but the salt water degrades them so more than a couple launches is unlikely. So each time a faring hits the water, it costs SpaceX $500,000 – $1 million dollars or more. At 22 launches per year, that adds up in a hurry.

So are the fairings passively falling, or are they guided to the ships in some way? Ships are very slow compared to even a parachuting object from the sky.

They use steerable parafoils.

Do you know how the steering is being done? Is it controlled from a computer on the fairing or is it remotely guided?

I apologize for not being able to find a cite, but my recollection is it's automated, targeting a set of GPS coordinates.

IIRC it's automated GPS to a staging area and the local ship takes over control when it comes within radio range.

This article just links to https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1285338582849208320 and adds a bit more context, if you don't want to blindly accept the Verizon GDPR wall.

I am just amazed that NASA turned around a shuttle in 54 days, I don't even recall it. Apparently these were the first two missions flown[0]. However I also read almost suffered Columbia's fate on one of its flight due to a large loss of tiles

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Atlantis#Flights...

Techcrunch : https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/spacex-successfully-catche...

Did they ever try catching it mid air? Something like a hook to helicopter perhaps? $6 mil is big number not to try.

Depending on the launch trajectory, these fairings come down between 40 km and 1400km offshore. So you either need a helicopter with incredible range and dwell time, or a boat with a helicopter pad AND a place to put the fairing if you catch it.

Say you catch the fairing. Great, now you have a giant composite/plastic sail, the size of school bus, bouncing around in your rotor downdraft. Not exactly the safest thing, and you're over water so you can't just put down anywhere.

So, it's complicated, and SpaceX decided to go with a boat rather than a helicopter-and-a-boat.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-mr-steven-renamed-falcon-he...

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21213917/rocket-lab-rocket...

Rocketlab first stage catch demo; they've got a heavy stage to catch (with heavy engines at the bottom to act as a counterweight) and it's not nearly as big as the Falcon 9 booster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3CWGDhkmbs&feature=emb_titl...

Balloons! But yeah, the boat is probably simpler / cheaper.

page is just blank for me...

Try enabling JavaScript.

no thanks

That's some top notch developing to not be able to display anything for non-JS enabled viewers.

By viewers you probably mean "people they aim to track"

This website is not trustworthy and doesn't respect GDPR as it redirects to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId

Engadget, stop this nonsense and change the responsibilities of the team who decided to put this into production.

Probably that decision was a c-level one, overruling at least the objection of the developers.

I'm not sure why you were downvoted, I hate sites where the only option to "do you want to be tracked?" is "yes" too.

There's always the ctrl-w option. It seems better that you have to consent rather than them just assuming you consent since you opened a link.

> There's always the ctrl-w option.

That is usually what I resort to.

> It seems better that you have to consent rather than them just assuming you consent since you opened a link.

Yes, but one of the two is completely illegal, and the other is slightly illegal.

While I fully agree with this sentiment generally, I wonder what people think of NPR and WaPo in comparison (both give much less choice than Engadget).

I seem to see this complaint on every Verizon-property article posted, but NPR and WaPo get excused?

I wonder is it just a UX difference?

European here, the NPR plain text site is a joy to use and I consider it one of the best and most compliant solutions, If I accidentally click a WaPo link I just navigate away from the paywall. Same with TechCrunch.

I agree. I can read NPR. uMatrix prevents that website from loading at all, so I never read the article.

A noticeable chunk of the Internet is now inaccessible to me, and I believe it's actually not for the worse...

there were a couple guys using acrobatic parachutes and some control code to fly high power model rockets back to the pad saving an hour walk. I wonder if SpaceX could use the same technique and fly the fairings to the ships.

That's what they already do. It's a steerable parafoil. How would they be expected to get the ship lined up underneath the parafoil in time to catch it otherwise?

I think those guys fly in much better weather conditions than the returning fairings.

If those guys miss by 50 meters, no biggie, they just walk and pick the rocket up.

If SpaceX misses by 5 meters, the fairings could end up in the salt water.

Landing on a moving ship is much harder.

Don't understand why they don't just use an inflatable parachute with a radio beacon antenna sticking out the top. Then they could just drive up anytime and fish it out of the water. Would immersion in salt water for a few hours damage a fairing?

> Would immersion in salt water for a few hours damage a fairing?

Yes.

They haven't been very public about how much refurbishment is required for fairings that they fish out of the ocean, but they've managed to use them on Starlink launches.

Or grab them with a hook dangling from a C-130 like the film from old-timey spy satellites.

Apparently thats been considered, and you still might see another company like electron try it. It's just a bit harder to do safely and some other limitations.

One of the main reasons they aren’t doing it is that the fairing halves are so far out to sea (about 800km down range) that no helicopter could have the range with a fairing dangling down to make it back to land (the Sikorsky Skyhook, for instance, only has a range of 200nmi or so... maybe you could get a specialized helicopter to do it with heroics like drop tanks, but the cost would be much higher), so they’d need to land on a ship after capture anyway. By catching the fairing halves with ships directly, they save the substantial costs of also having helicopters.

Notice that with RocketLab reuse, the helicopter is staged from a ship at sea. However, probably can save more money by recovering a RocketLab Electron first stage than half of a fairing (you’d need one helicopter per fairing halve but only one helicopter for Electron... Electron also has a much smaller and less awkward aerodynamic cross section than a F9 fairing halve). See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=enndCzvZpZk

They considered doing that to reuse the Saturn V with a giant helicopter with rockets at the end of each propeller. It didnt go anywhere. Though people have been using air capture for more reasonable use cases, and rocket lab is going to be air capturing their electron rockets.

I haven’t heard about this giant helicopter idea before. Here’s an article I found about it:

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1045/1

Very cool article. The Hiller Air & Space museum mentioned in the piece is well worth visiting if one happens to be in the Bay Area.

I think you're talking about the old Corona satellites, where they would have film and drop it back to earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)

The problem with this and a fairing is that if the fairing catches the open side, it's going to drag behind like a giant parachute and take the plane down. The fairing is huge (13m long x 5m diameter), even compared to a big plane.

ULA is planning that (with a helicopter) to catch the engines from their upcoming Vulcan rocket. https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/14/ula-chief-explains-reu...

That was the original plan. But according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Centaur they went ahead without funding it, though they may some time in the future. So for now Vulcan is going to have a disposable first stage, just like all the other old-time space rockets.

Yes. The couple they reused after fishing them out required extensive rebuilds.

There are a lot of electronics on these things and weight is ultimate factor.

Salt water is the worst. It takes a lot of effort to clean it all off and it causes corrosion all the while. Even the ones that do hit water, they get them out as fast as they safely can.

As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), SpaceX have only reused previously-wet farings on their own Starlink launches. They don't risk potentially damaged parts on external customers.

Forget immersion- just contacting salt water is enough to wreck your day. It's highly corrosive and protecting from that corrosion would require engineering coatings that are light, cheap, and also able to handle the temperature and pressure and wind stresses of a literal rocket launch. It's a lot.

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