SpaceX is throwing in the towel on fairing recovery, at least in terms of catching them.
There is always a tradeoff between reusability and expendability in terms of minimizing cost per flight. Shuttle had some notoriously bad design decisions, because they anticipated a higher flight rate than they ever got. At the end of the program, it was clear that it would have been cheaper to expend the SRBs than to recover and refurbish them, because of the high fixed costs of the recovery fleet that had to be amortized over a low flight rate. Expending the ET cost tens of millions per flight.
Elon was determined early on to recover as much of the vehicle as possible (they spent years trying to figure out how to recover the upper stage of the Falcon), but he finally decided that the only solution was to scale the vehicle up, and go to stainless steel to handle entry heating, so the focus is on Starship now, and Falcon 9 has reached the end of its development cycle.
As I understand it, the fairings probably had a better survival rate in the water than dealing the occasional oopsies with the net, even when they did get caught. There were also the difficulties of the ships coping with the four hugs arms that held the net up, which definitely detracted from stability.
And there’s really not much on the fairing that would be damaged by saltwater, since they’re made out of carbon fiber composite, just like racing yachts.
Sounds like the arms would break off in rough seas.
For a “splashdown” fairing, it would be difficult to ensure that all of the water had been removed from the honeycomb core prior to reflight. Water vaporizing in the core at altitude could well cause the face sheets to delaminate and rip off, causing loss of mission. It happened more than once with early honeycomb composite fairings, before they figured out that they had to vent the air during ascent. Water just makes it worse.
They can bake the fairings after rinsing them in fresh water…
They can also reuse the non-preferred fairings on starlink missions, and offer new fairings with some cost to those customers that preferred pristine fairings.
And they can run them through a vacuum chamber, and weigh them to know almost exactly how much moisture might be inside.
Of course, if there was an orbital market for fairings as habitable structures, they could fly them all the way to orbit, ejecting the payload out the front or back instead of splitting the fairing in half, as long as they could reseal the payload hatch. The delivered payload would drop, and they’d likely end up with a much heavier fairing to make it meet any habitability requirements, but then the fairing itself would also be payload.
However, given Starship’s capabilities, I can’t foresee anyone wanting a much smaller and lighter module than what SpaceX could routinely deliver to LEO.
The only vacuum chamber big enough for the F-9 fairing is the Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility, formerly known as Plum Brook Station. That’s where SpaceX did its fairing separation tests. It’s horrendously expensive to operate, and one might as well throw the fairing away.
Oh, if Elon wanted a big vacuum chamber he could have one welded up in no time. It’s basically a submarine hull that only has to withstand a depth of 34 feet.
If NASA built a coffee table it would cost a fortune to operate.
This one simple trick will get SpaceX to hire you as a contractor, give your ship some goofy name.
And yet NASA could never have gotten STS approved with the economics of replacing pretty much everything except the shuttle body…
At least Space-X has the sense to cash out of a bad hand.
Just like they did with Falcon Heavy.
The SRBs were hardly reusable. The case insulator, integral throat-exit, nozzle exit cone, and nozzle flexseal were all single-use. There was no refurbishment possible, even in principle – they were just thrown away. That constituted most of the inert mass of the motor. In fact together with the ET, on a mass basis, the Shuttle expended more mass than most non-reusable launch vehicles for the delivered payload.
@Michael S. Kelly
They’re made from carbon fiber, they had to be in a chamber or bag big enough to make them at least once….. And isn’t that what they were making in the building in Long Beach?
Your headline seems a touch misleading–SpaceX is not giving up on recovering and reusing the fairings. SpaceX is giving up on trying to catch them a few feet above the water. Improvements to the fairings have made them more resilient to seawater, and different ships are used to fish them out shortly after they splash down.
What StarShip is really replacing is the second stage of F9, which is currently impossible to recover. SpaceX looked into ways to recover the second stage a few years ago, but concluded that the mass cost was simply far too high unless you scaled the second stage way up, in which case you needed a bigger first stage, in which case why not just build a whole new rocket with the new methane engines they were working one…
I always thought that of all the things SpaceX has done steering a parachute with a fairing slung underneath it and timing it to land on a ship at sea was one of the easier tasks. Apparently I was very wrong.
To be fair, the aerospace portion was fairly easy. The nautical stuff of having a ship with a big net was hard.
I wonder why they didn’t create a big blow up airbag, tow it behind the catch vessel, and let it land there. It still might get some water on it, but probably not much more than the sea spray as it is being brought back to port. To be clear, you would haul in the airbag and store the fairing before heading back in.
And airbag does sound more workable, but I wonder how much one that size would cost to operate, and what its operational lifetime would be if it was constantly having to be unreeled, inflated, deflated, and reeled back in? It also might be much harder to positively position it in the wind. Given their 10% success rate with the net, I would think they’d still face the same problem of having most of their fairings ending up in the water.
My guess as to why the fairing-catch system couldn’t be made to work reliably is wind variance. Near the surface, you get gusts and other variations that impart variables. So, you’d have unexpected motions during the last few hundred feet, motions that occurred too late to compensate for. This problem was exacerbated by the low mass and high sail area of the fairing.
There are GPS driven parachute cargo delivery systems used by the military. Was the parachute used on the fairing actively steerable or were they just trying to move the boat to catch it?
Both.
A completely reusable upper stage completely does away with this problem. Fortunately, SpaceX is already working on such a rocket.
But in the meantime, even if all they can use the fished fairings for is Starlink launches, that’s still got to be worth the effort to fish them out.
On on unrelated subject, the Navy released a batch of UFO images last week and one of them looked like a tetrahedron. I googled “tetrahedral balloons” and sure enough, NOAA and the University of Hawaii release Mylar tetroons with a sensor package to monitor oceanic air circulation patterns all over the world. There are other groups using that shape too, including a solar heated version that caused a UFO stir over the Southwest.
See “Insights from four generations of Lagrangian smart balloons in atmospheric research”, S. Businger et al.
Discovery’s “What on Earth?” can still make an episode about it that will spend 3 segments with supposedly intelligent people explaining how they were seeing possible spaceships from another planet and what that means, before explaining it was just a balloon.
And people who would normally be considered scientists actually float those idiotic conspiracy theories… Just so they get face time on TV..
Whores, all whores