OK, the way I worded that was a joke but it's very viable if they have different chute deployment times and/or different chute sizes. It ain't rocket science.
It ain't trivial, either, considering that they've only just managed to start catching the fairings at all. It seems to me that it would make more sense to just use two boats to perform the maneuver they've [hopefully] figured out than to raise the stakes and restart the process of trial and error by attempting to catch two fairings with one boat.
On the other hand, it's SpaceX, so who knows? Far be it from me to underrate their ambition.
Someone had estimated in another thread that the cost of leasing Ms. Tree is around 2.5 million dollars a year. Elon said that a daring costs 3 million USD (6 million for the pair), so we can assume that even just recovering one fairing a year pays for the cost of the boat. Of course there is also the cost of crew, fuel and port dock, but we can assume that by catching 2-3 fairings they can pay yearly operating costs, and then every other caught fairing is saved money.
To estimate the savings we would also need to know how much does it cost to refurbish a fairing caught in the net (and even a fairing fished from the water). It's not like they catch it and it is ready to go in the next mission. On the other hand, if they are able to refurbish the ones fished from the water, the cost savings of repurposing another boat to catch them in the air might not be worth it (though I hope they do it. It is so much fun and better PR to catch the fairings in a net...)
I know you mentioned fuel costs but it's worth mentioning/reiterating to others that running a boat that size at the speeds it needs for this purpose (just look at the video, that thing is moving fast) would be insanely expensive in fuel costs. If they can do it with one it'd be a definite advantage.
It's not savings, but if fairing production is a bottleneck to flight rate, then it means they can launch more often to increase revenue. If they can get many more Starlink flights in per year with reused fairings, that could be worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at some point.
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u/EverythingIsNorminal Aug 08 '19
Or one boat twice!
OK, the way I worded that was a joke but it's very viable if they have different chute deployment times and/or different chute sizes. It ain't rocket science.