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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.
by 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 agoAccording 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 agoThat's just speculation, I wouldn't cite it as an authoritative source.
- azernik 8y agoThe 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 agoThat 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.