It's a good thing because otherwise, I've got just about nothing.
No space-related news that I can find, except for one little thing. It's not really news, it's just a cool video from the camera on one of the payload fairings from Sunday night's Falcon Heavy launch.
The Tweet presents this as a continuous loop, 29 seconds long, and includes this pretty cool fact.
Fairing reentry on the ViaSat-3 mission was the hottest and fastest we've ever attempted. The fairings re-entered the atmosphere greater than 15x the speed of sound, creating a large trail of plasma in its wake
The fairing was to be recovered by their recovery ship Doug, which was the farthest downrange it had ever gone, over 1200 miles from its home port. The SpaceX Twitter feed doesn't say that one or both fairing halves were recovered, so we just have to wait. When you watch the plasma in that fairing video, it's easy to imagine it being damaged enough to interfere with reuse but I doubt they would have deployed the recovery ship if they thought the chances were high it was going to be unusable.
Only somewhere related, the launch was a beautiful one from our yard. At 8:26 PM, it was a half hour after sunset, so once it got past booster cutoff, the second stage was in sunlight resulting in a pretty contrail. The sound waves from the launch were audible for quite a while after staging, something that doesn't happen regularly.
Even if Elon knew that it was trashed, he would want it to be returned for study. He doesn't mind spending money today, if it saves money in future.
ReplyDeleteI mourn the loss of real Star Wars. Dammit, Han shot first!
ReplyDelete"So it is written, so it was done" - to butcher the real quote. But I saw the first Star Wars when it came out and on TV before the revised ones. Han shot first. Besides, Greedo wouldn't have missed from that range.
DeleteAre the fairings over engineered?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how to define over engineered.
DeleteFairings have never been re-used before, but neither have boosters. Their Falcon 9 fleet is largely re-used now, what (for good reason) they call "flight-proven" and I think the most experienced booster has flown 16 times but I haven't seen mention of that in a while. I don't think they have any fairings that have reached that number.
Absolutely beautiful, but was the video sped up? Anyway, that fairing was hauling ass and I am amazed that it was as stable as it was - one little tumble at that speed and it's all over!
ReplyDeleteGonna be cool to see the results of the entry debriding of the shell's surface. IF SpaceX decides to release them, which I hope they do!!
Here's Scott Manley's take on that:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRvO8D9TR08
I was almost completely through that video before I noticed it said the date posted was three years ago. Just based on how quickly SpaceX innovates, that has to make it an approximation to what we saw.
DeleteMy guess is it has to be actively stabilized. A control loop.
But, yeah, I hope they release pictures of what it looked like after that.