8 ms·

Not only that, but apparently they recovered both fairings: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-f

• qmarchi 8y ago
  It's an interesting issue with the fairings, and I'm interested to see what (or if) they're going to solve the issue with the saltwater contaminated fairings. Being a SpaceX launcher, as the article indicates, means they can accept higher risks, but in turn has a greater financial risk to the company. It's times like this where I'm glad SpaceX is a private company.
  • pedrocr 8y ago
    According to a reddit thread they've saltwater hardened the fairings and now they can reuse them: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bc8105/arabsat6a_elon_musk_on_twitter_both_fairing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bc8105/arabsat6a_el... The first reuse mission seems to be an internal one though.
    • Ajedi32 8y ago
      That's just speculation, I wouldn't cite it as an authoritative source.
      • azernik 8y ago
        The part that says they're able to reuse these ones is a tweet directly from Elon Musk; he also confirms they were recovered from in the water, not caught in the air.
        • Ajedi32 8y ago
          That information was already covered by the news article linked in the root comment above. The additional suggestion by a commenter in the Reddit thread that "they've saltwater hardened the fairings" is speculation.
        • RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
          >The part that says they're able to reuse these ones is a tweet directly from Elon Musk; And we know that Elon Musk only ever tweets true information.
  • wongarsu 8y ago
    > in turn has a greater financial risk to the company A financial risk you can count as R&D cost. SpaceX has also positioned itself for some launches that would be acceptable to loose, like the deployment phase of starlink: loosing a few mass-produced satellites has to be much cheaper than loosing a big one-off satellite that takes months to rebuild.
• taneq 8y ago
  I guess salt water isn't that much of an issue after all?
  • fabatka 8y ago
    I think that is only an issue with hard to clean equipment, like engines.
    • 0xffff2 8y ago
      SpaceX thought it was enough of a problem for the fairings that they built a boat [1] to catch them before they hit the water. Either they've redesigned the fairings or they've re-evaluated their post-recovery process to make it possible to reuse fairings recovered from the water. [1]: https://www.space.com/41614-spacex-mr-steven-catcher-boat-up-close.html https://www.space.com/41614-spacex-mr-steven-catcher-boat-up...
  • jessriedel 8y ago
    Yea, I wish we'd get a more detailed explanation of the accounting on this. For all I knew it was totally plausible that fairings would be destroyed by sea water, and it was also plausible there'd be no damage. The part that confuses me is why they would spend so much effort trying to catch them with Mr. Steven if they are in fact serviceable after a swim. Maybe the idea is that salt-water refurbishment-and-reuse saves a bit of money compared to expendable, but mid-air-catch would have saved more but turned out to be too difficult?
    • wongarsu 8y ago
      The fairings are also quite big, so I imagine they get destroyed by waves very quickly if the sea isn't completely calm.
    • taneq 8y ago
      There was a sibling comment which mentioned some kind of anti-salt-water treatment, I guess that was Plan B and crossed the finish line while Plan A was still struggling?
• rinchik 8y ago
  Same link but this one doesn't report your click to google: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-fairing-recovery-starlink/amp/ https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-fairing-recove...
  • criley2 8y ago
    I see multiple requests to ampproject on the official page, so Google is getting data regardless.
    • kohtatsu 8y ago
      It does work for those using a content blocker or tracker-blacklisted DNS service.
    • Sniffnoy 8y ago
      So, now without amp, too: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-fairing-recovery-starlink/ https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-fairing-recove...
      • criley2 8y ago
        Not that I'm avoiding google, but this link connects to google.com googlesyndication.com googletagmanager.com gstatic.com When rendering the page, so this just proves that avoiding sending data to google is very tricky indeed!
• woodandsteel 8y ago
  So now they have recovered the fairings? SpaceX just keeps getting farther and farther ahead of everyone else.