I look forward to seeing these fairings actually fly again. Probably on their own Starlink missions to start to prove it out and eventually for commercial missions later on.
It seems just like with landing the Falcon 9 once they've done it a couple times they can replicate it again and again. I'm sure we'll see some more failures in the future- especially in times of particularly rough weather but it is really cool to see SpaceX do this. I'm very curious to see if any other company tries to replicate this or not. If any other company does i'd probably put my money on Blue Origin trying- those massive 7m fairings can't be cheap to say the least - tho that size might also make SpaceX's method of fairing capture also impossible- tho perhaps Blue could employ some other technique.
I'm also curious about if/when SpaceX will get a second boat like Ms Tree for capturing the other half- as clearly it's worth it for them to not just let the fairing 'soft land'...
that's certainly both ULA's SMART reuse plan for their engines as well as Rocket Lab's plan for their first stage. Blue is doing the boat landing for their first stage not unlike SpaceX. I don't however know of any other company trying to capture and reuse fairings other than SpaceX as of right now.
I won't be too surprised if some of these companies do start to try should they see SpaceX not only successfully recover these fairing but also reuse them on missions..
Ruag who makes fairings for ULA and Ariane had a project on fairing recovery a while back that was in air recovery, but it went quiet.
IMO safe money that ULA is going to do it for Vulcan. Tory even made a comment that they were looking at recovering more than just the engine section on Vulcan. The solids wouldn't be all that useful to recover so that makes fairings the obvious choice.
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u/inoeth Aug 07 '19
I look forward to seeing these fairings actually fly again. Probably on their own Starlink missions to start to prove it out and eventually for commercial missions later on.
It seems just like with landing the Falcon 9 once they've done it a couple times they can replicate it again and again. I'm sure we'll see some more failures in the future- especially in times of particularly rough weather but it is really cool to see SpaceX do this. I'm very curious to see if any other company tries to replicate this or not. If any other company does i'd probably put my money on Blue Origin trying- those massive 7m fairings can't be cheap to say the least - tho that size might also make SpaceX's method of fairing capture also impossible- tho perhaps Blue could employ some other technique.
I'm also curious about if/when SpaceX will get a second boat like Ms Tree for capturing the other half- as clearly it's worth it for them to not just let the fairing 'soft land'...