SpaceX: Gone Fishin'

SpaceX tried to catch its rocket's nose cone with a giant net - and just missed

After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket's nose cone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nose cone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.

From article, (After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket’s nose cone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nose cone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.

Also known as the payload fairing, the nose cone is an earplug-shaped casing that sits on the top of the rocket, shielding the vehicle’s payload during launch. Once in space, the fairing breaks apart into two pieces and falls back to Earth. Normally, companies don’t recover the pieces of the fairing after a launch, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been eager to find a way to save the hardware. “Imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it’s going to smash into the ocean,” Musk said during a press conference in March 2017. “Would you try to recover that? Yes. Yes, you would.”

SpaceX has been able to land its fairings in the ocean before, but this was the first time the company deployed Mr. Steven to catch one of the pieces. Musk noted that a fairing half missed the boat by a few hundred meters. However, the company should be able to fix the problem by making the parafoils bigger, he said.

Though the pieces may have landed undamaged in the Pacific, it’s unclear if they can be used again. The possibility seems unlikely, as seawater can cause significant damage to spacecraft without proper shielding. In January, one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets somehow managed to survive intact after falling in the Atlantic Ocean, and Musk said the company would attempt to pull it back to shore. But that never happened. “The stage broke apart before we could complete an unplanned recovery effort for this mission,” SpaceX said in a statement.

Still, SpaceX will keep trying to save more nose cones in the months ahead. “My guess is next six months we’ve got fairing recovery figured out,” Musk said during a press conference for the Falcon Heavy launch. He even added that Mr. Steven could be used to catch more than just the fairing. “I think we can do the same thing with Dragon,” he said, referring to the company’s crew and cargo spacecraft.)

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Two Experimental Starlink Satellites were Lofted into Orbit. If proven successful, Starlink's batches of satellites, should start launching next year.

SpaceX launches broadband pathfinders

SpaceX launched again on Thursday - this time to put a Spanish radar satellite above the Earth. But there was a lot of interest also in the mission's secondary payloads - a couple of spacecraft the Californian rocket company will use to trial the delivery of broadband from orbit.

 From article, (Wednesday's Falcon-9 took up the Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b testbeds (CEO Elon Musk dubbed them Tintin A & B in a tweet).

The pair are identical - with a bus, or chassis, being slightly less than 1 cu metre, and having two 8m-long solar wings; and weighing roughly 400kg.

The Microsats are intended to prove all the different design elements, such as the antenna that will relay the data traffic.

If all proceeds as it should, SpaceX will aim to start deploying Starlink's satellites in batches over the next few years.

The Falcon Heavy, with its enormous lifting capacity, could help accelerate the roll-out.

These spacecraft would be positioned at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km, and transmit in the Ku and Ka portions of the radio spectrum.

The company would like also to put up an additional 7,500 satellites that would sit under the initial set and transmit in the V-band.

SpaceX does not talk much about its broadband plans, but that is true of all the companies that have similar proposals.In 2016, it filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in the US for a licence to operate a "mesh network" in the sky consisting of 4,425 satellites arranged in 83 orbital planes.

Some of these firms have already launched pathfinders. Telesat of Canada, for example, launched its Phase 1 LEO satellite in January. This is a prototype for more than 100 follow-on platforms.

Perhaps the most advanced mega-constellation in this field is OneWeb, which will be launching 10 satellites later this year for a network that will eventually comprise at least 600, but which could eventually encompass more than 2,000 spacecraft.

OneWeb is backed by heavyweights in the space industry, such Airbus, Qualcomm, Intelsat, Hughes, and MDA.)

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