SpaceX's 'Wet' Fleet Gives Up On Catching Falling Fairings

hello it's scott manley here last week we found out that two high-profile members of spacex's fleet are leaving for new opportunities over the last couple of years mystery and mischief have been working on fearing recovery using their massive nets to try to catch the fairings discarded by rockets now these fairings are flying vehicles in their own right with control systems navigation reaction control thrusters and steerable power foils that allow them to navigate through re-entry and down to a gentle touchdown on the ocean now the fairings cost millions of dollars each and when i was at spacex's factory you could see that the uh fairing manufacturer just took a huge section of the factory floor on its own so i can see why recovery was justified so both ships had made successful catches in their career using the massive nets but the experience hasn't all been good and many more of the fairings have been recovered after a soft landing in the water perhaps more importantly there have been a few incidents where things went really wrong sometimes the fairings hit the net but then were pulled off and damaged as the parafoils failed to separate and after some rough seas we've seen ships come back with damaged nets or even missing arms just due to the problems of navigating such unwieldy vessels on the high seas but i think perhaps most importantly the fairings recovered from the water have been reflown successfully without any issues that we know of i mean beyond losing the sound dampening panels that are used to protect sensitive payloads so while spacex initially had high hopes for flawless fearing recovery they've now had enough experience and got enough data to show that the benefit of a dry faring recovery isn't worth the extra costs and risks associated with it and also with the majority of spacex flights being starlink launches there's no extra effort needed to convince the customer that reflow and faring is completely completely free of salt water so mischief and mystery are leaving the spacex fleet they've been stripped of their giant nets and other special equipment and as they left the harbor we saw you know the classic navy salute or marine salute i don't know spraying water at the back as they set their course for louisiana for new jobs it's important to note that they are leaving the spacex fleet but they weren't really owned and operated directly by spacex i believe um these vessels are like secor marine and juice oceanic i don't know um so anyway yeah it's fearing recovery is still gonna happen but instead of you know landing on a ship by carefully matching the course and hitting the net they're gonna land gently in the water where they will be a ship will rendezvous with them and recover them and this new ship ship that was assigned for the latest launch is the sheila bordelon operated by bordelon marine and it's described as an ultra light intervention vessel it's mainly been working in the offshore oil business and it can use they talk about how it can use remotely operated vehicles to perform work up to three kilometers underwater and it has a crane able to go that deep i don't think they're recovering any fairings from underwater but point is that's what it's been designed for so yeah this ship has been practicing faring recovery off the coast for the last few weeks and wednesday's starlink launch number 23 was its first attempt to do it for real and a day later it returned to port with a fairing half on its deck so i'm presuming at this point that they do have enough data to know that it's worth their time and effort if it wasn't they could just build the fairings without any of the extra recovery gear and that would make them lighter and save money i'm not sure we'll see any other space launch providers investing in fairing recovery based on spacex's experience even although we are seeing some other launch providers really starting to take steps towards booster recovery so anyway while we're on the subject of spacex's navy it's worth talking about the rest of their fleet the company actually has a substantial number of marine vessels that they use for its operations uh they have ships for the recovery of the dragon capsules the fairings we they have the drone ships for recovering the boosters and of course they have tugs and support ships that are used to move the uh barges and uh support them and now if you're really interested in all the comings and goings of spacex's wet fleet then i'm going to say gavin cornwell he runs the spacex fleet.com and he has a patreon uh he's been tracking all these operations in far more detail than i could ever manage so actually let's talk about them first we're going to start with the drone ships the gigantic landing pads that sit in the middle of the ocean and provide a safe place for the boosters to touch down after their flight to space these are referred to by the acronym asdas autonomous spaceport drone ship while they might look like dumb barges towed by truck er tugs they've got their own onboard propulsion that keeps them in place against the forces of oceanic currents and weather during the landing operations they can hold their positions within about three meters so there's three of them all of them with names very much inspired by the work of scottish sci-fi author ian m banks there's of course i still love you which has been the primary east coast ocean landing site there's just read the instructions which started as a west coast landing ship but was then moved to the east coast to support the more rapid launch cadence in the last couple of years and finally still under construction there is a shortfall of gravitas and that will be used to restore astis recovery option for from a vandenberg so they were all constructed in louisiana and to get to the west coast incidentally the just read the instructions had to go through the panama canal but it's actually too wide in its final configuration so the landing pad extensions the wings like along the side those were built but they weren't loaded onto the deck of just read the instructions so we could navigate the canal and once on the west coast the pad extensions were lifted off and then welded on there to match the final configuration and that meant for the return trip they had to cut these off again put them on the deck travel through the canal and then reattach them on the east coast so also by the way just read the instructions it's the second spacex drone ship with this name there was an earlier one that was used for landing attempts in 2015 when they were still working on the problem and i guess that some lessons they might have learned during this resulted in changes to of course i still love you and that would actually be the first drone ship to be used and to recover a booster i think they probably just scrap the original just read the instructions and the current one follows the design of of course i still love you and i'm going to say that as a fan of ian m banks those names never get old i was delighted to see um richard garriott going to the bottom of the ocean and there were ships called the limiting factor it was fabulous so anyway while those drone ships have their own propulsion with the azimuth thrusters to hold position they don't actually travel long distances under their own power instead they're towed to the landing sites by tugs and there's quite a few different tugs that they've used over the years and i think there's nothing special about these there's uh currently the hawk the finn falgot laurent foss the hollywood they don't have anything special about them but they can be used to move these things around so the drone ships also have a support ship assigned to them for operations and these are the vessels actually have the crew on them and they'll have communications equipment and other special gear that's needed to help with the recovery now this has usually been the gold quest on the east coast and on the few droner ship recoveries on the west coast has been the nrc quest and these are operated by different operators right go i think is juice offshore with a g and nrc is national response corporation more importantly though nrc quest which was operated on the west coast it was the primary recovery vessel for all the dragon one capsules which yeah they landed in the pacific and it would be picked up put on the deck and the ship would return to port as quickly as possible so they could offload the science experiments from the iss and hand it off to handlers on the ground now for dragon 2 both crew and cargo vessels are intended to land on the east coast and now that these might contain crew there's actually a pair of recovery ships so there's redundancy there's go searcher and go navigator and these are configured identically with the recovery crane and other support equipment but they also have a helipad and that's important if there's an emergency and they need to get crew back to shore quickly so these two ships are also being used for faring recovery in the past but i imagine that that might be a short-term thing really not clear but that is a capability they have in the last few months of course we've seen two of the biggest additions to the fleet with an eye on future offshore rocket operations of starship phobos and demos a pair of former oil drilling platforms apparently acquired at a bargain basement price as the demand for oil cratered in the last year and these massive platforms were costing millions of dollars to upkeep so their owners were happy to get rid of them i hear a platform of this size with all the equipment costs on the order of half a billion dollars and spacex managed to pick them up for less than one percent of this although i imagine that that might not include all of the equipment which might be returned to the owner or previous owner so anyway these are currently being stripped down to their structure but given that the plan is to literally catch the boosters in the launch support hardware and eliminate the need for landing legs we can only really imagine what they might look like when they're finally done then again plans change so you know we'll have to basically see how things take shape over the coming year to get an idea how these end up looking finally i think i need to give a shout out to the permanent crew members of the spacex navy an elusive group of characters who we rarely see they practically live on the drone ships these crew members go into danger to make sure that the still smoking boosters are secured quickly before the rest of the crew who have much more sense of self-preservation are allowed near i'm of course talking about the octograbbers which emerge from their garages moments after boost landing they roll under the rocket and then secure it in place that there's no chance of the booster falling over in high seas we've actually seen a few boosters lost after successful landings because octogrammer either didn't exist at the time or wasn't able to help i guess my favorite one most interesting one is the one of the falcon heavy cores which landed safely but there were subtle differences to the booster design and that meant the octo grabber wasn't able to deploy to secure it and the booster fell over on the way home i mean you know the saying for every great booster there's a great optigrabber securing them or something like that i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] so [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 386,233

Rating: 4.970819 out of 5

Keywords: navy, ships, spacex, ms tree, ms chief

Id: 8wdo6P84TGA

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021