SpaceX has successfully recovered two pairs of Falcon 9 payload fairings, one in two times, in a month after twin ships GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief returned to port on July 2.
About 45 minutes after the Falcon 9 B1060 first took off with the US Army’s third updated GPS III satellite in tow and about 40 minutes after the rocket’s payload fairing was deployed, both halves of the fairing gently splashed into the Atlantic Ocean just a few miles away. Lacking their primary recovery nets in an odd configuration, Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief fished half of the ocean with smaller secondary nets before placing the fairings on their decks for technicians to secure.
Just over two weeks earlier, both ships were in the midst of recovering the Starlink-8 mission fairings twice flown in from the ocean, safely returning them – intact – to shore for the first time since SpaceX began to reuse fairings. As SpaceX itself noted at the end of its GPS III SV03 webcast, the intact retrieval of the mission fairing halves guarantees that they will be reused in the near future.
Based on three previous fairing reuses in November 2019, March 2020, and June 2020, SpaceX could change the GPS III SV03 pair for a second release in just a few months from now. However, like Falcon 9 booster reuse, SpaceX is likely to gradually gain experience and data that will allow them to reuse fairings more quickly and blow them up three or more times.
SpaceX’s first successful recovery of a twice-flown fairing last month also means the company may also be just a few months away from flying a payload fairing three times, for the first time. SpaceX has yet to confirm whether Falcon 9’s existing payload fairing design allows for more than two reuses, although it seems like a safe bet given that the company’s updated “Fairing 2.0” debuted just a few months before Falcon 9 Block 5, highly optimized to allow for more than 10 flights per booster.
In response to a Teslarati article looking at the first opportunity to reuse a Falcon fairing twice, CEO Elon Musk noted that “reusing the fairing looks good”, perhaps confirming that SpaceX will actually attempt to reuse the Starlink-8 fairing. In any case, with multiple recovered fairings now underway, SpaceX’s fairings reuse program is rapidly beginning to illustrate its value after almost years of concerted effort and investment.
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