New Ship for Fairing Recovery
- Thread starter Grendal
- Start date
What is interesting about the ship itself ? That looks like a fairly standard offshore supply vessel with a typical lightweight subsea fitout MV SHELIA BORDELON The interesting aspect surely is why the normal fairing recovery vessels are both unavailable ? Am I missing something ?
Both Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief are being re-outfitted for recovery operations with the upcoming Commercial Crew launches and recoveries: Crew 2 is going up and Crew 1 is coming back.
SpaceX is not renewing the lease on Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief. SpaceX has dropped the idea of catching the fairings and is moving forward with the new ship and water recovery.
e-FTW
New electron smell
That makes me a little sad.
But it makes sense: the majority of launches are Starlink, and they have no qualms about re-using sea-soaked fairings on those (since they don’t appear to need clean-room condition fairing halves for Starlink). That leaves only a handful of customer missions a year that would be open to re-used fairings but that would also require ones that were caught in a net.
They made it happen, more than once. We got cool footage, thanks SpaceX!
But it makes sense: the majority of launches are Starlink, and they have no qualms about re-using sea-soaked fairings on those (since they don’t appear to need clean-room condition fairing halves for Starlink). That leaves only a handful of customer missions a year that would be open to re-used fairings but that would also require ones that were caught in a net.
They made it happen, more than once. We got cool footage, thanks SpaceX!
Same... that one video of the fairing half gliding in to the net was cool...
