Quote:
Originally Posted by Flash
Great follow up info here. Thank you for being on top of the tech side of things to!
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You're welcome. That was definitely a mountaintop day! Dean Fox's posting--of Elon Musk's post-launch comments--also revealed another interesting--and commercially significant--occurrence:
Not only did they recover both of the Falcon 9's fairing halves, but they were recovered, undamaged, ^from the water^. He also Tweeted that they will be reused later this year for a Starlink launch. (I've long mused that it should be feasible to make seaworthy payload fairings out of composites, metal, or a combination of the two, which could be recovered from the water and reused with little or no refurbishment besides a fresh water wash-down and post-drying inspection. If floatation material is needed, it could double as the acoustic dampening interior liner material [that may be what SpaceX has done].) Also:
This SpaceFlightNow article
https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/04/...mmercial-debut/ covered these and other developments (NASA is also looking at the Falcon Heavy--with an Interim Cryogenic Stage on top--as a possible SLS replacement...), and *this*
https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/04/...-future-launch/ article covered the fairing recovery (and it includes a picture of a fairing half, descending under its parafoil, after a Falcon 9 launch; Elon Musk tweeted that recovering and reusing ocean-landed ones isn't a show-stopper, as they had feared earlier).