Adds Second Ship For Recovering The Components To Its Fleet

SpaceX has added a second ship designed to recover fairings from its launch vehicles to its fleet. The Ms. Chief joins the Ms. Tree in the company's efforts to make as many components of its spacecraft as possible reusable.

The website Inverse.com reports that collecting the multi-million-dollar fairings, which protect payloads during launch, has proven to be problematic. The ships are equipped with large nets that are positioned where it is anticipated that the fairings will return to Earth, snagging them as they fall. If they can be captured, they can be reused, further reducing the cost of launches provided by the company.

The fairings return to Earth at about Mach 8. But for a long time, the ship Mr. Steven, now known as Ms. Tree, was unable to retrieve any of the fairings despite being fitted with guidance systems and other tracking devices.

Ms. Tree, and Ms. Chief, are fitted with larger nets which cover nearly an acre. New arms have been installed to make the nets "springy, like a highly-damped trampoline."

The upgraded Ms. Tree was able to recover a fairing half during the Space Test Program-2 mission. She caught another fairing after the launch of the AMOS-17 mission.

But it may be awhile before SpaceX will have another chance to test the ships. Teslarati reports that there are no hard dates for upcoming launches that would allow another attempt. That does, however, give SpaceX an opportunity to fine-tune the system.

(Image provided by SpaceX)

FMI: Source report