If you are embarrassed like me about making ignorant comments on this forum then that's good but remember thatall sorts of people set themselves up as experts:https://www.sciencealert.com/spacex-falcon-9-space-rocket-giant-piece-found-beach
Quote from: alang on 10/21/2018 08:40 pmIf you are embarrassed like me about making ignorant comments on this forum then that's good but remember thatall sorts of people set themselves up as experts:https://www.sciencealert.com/spacex-falcon-9-space-rocket-giant-piece-found-beachWow. That 'journalist' is as thick as a plank. A thick one.
And it'll be mighty difficult if the company keeps losing huge and expensive parts.
What a fantastic video. Surprising how much the fairing flexes.
Falcon fairing halves missed the net, but touched down softly in the water. Mr Steven is picking them up. Plan is to dry them out & launch again. Nothing wrong with a little swim.
Mr. Steven is still having bad luck:https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1069679948103847939QuoteFalcon fairing halves missed the net, but touched down softly in the water. Mr Steven is picking them up. Plan is to dry them out & launch again. Nothing wrong with a little swim. It seems that Elon is giving up on the idea of catching them in mid-air, and is thinking about waterproofing them ...
The company is already working on a successor for the black panels that it used at the Tesla launch. 'We are working on a hydrophobic version, to keep the pieces afloat when they fall into the sea. Reuse is one of the hobbies of SpaceX. '
Looks like SpaceX is going to try fairing reuse even if the halves hit water.https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1069679948103847939QuoteFalcon fairing halves missed the net, but touched down softly in the water. Mr Steven is picking them up. Plan is to dry them out & launch again. Nothing wrong with a little swim.I suggested earlier that one could try to submerge the halves in de-ionised water until all the salt would wash away, or at least enough salt to make them fit for reuse.
Exciting that they are looking at the reuse and that they recovered both halves. They're clearing getting them very close to where they can predict them to be.Reuse is great, I think they can still figure out the catching.Does Mr Steven stay stationary, or do they move along with the fairing so they can minimize any error until it's caught? I've not heard how they do the final part, but seems that they stay in 1 spot.Seems to me that 1 half of a 2 body rendezvous situation needs to be propulsive if the other is passive. The F9 is under thrust when landing. A fairing is a glider and gets into a 'best I can do' situation the closer it gets to the surface. Grab some Tesla and F9 technology and get it working on Mr Steven.
The nice thing in principle about the fairing is you can try dropping it in a representative way a few dozen times after tipping the water out, and then do an exhaustive destructive teardown on it, and be moderately sure you've got no major issues left.It costs helicopter time, not any sort of launch, for the interesting last ten meters.
Quote from: speedevil on 12/03/2018 08:38 pmThe nice thing in principle about the fairing is you can try dropping it in a representative way a few dozen times after tipping the water out, and then do an exhaustive destructive teardown on it, and be moderately sure you've got no major issues left.It costs helicopter time, not any sort of launch, for the interesting last ten meters.They don't need a helicopter if that's all they're interested in. They could do tethered drop tests into a pool.