A jaw-dropping video of a ship recovering a rocket fairing at sea in a first for California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp which is trading as SpaceX.
According to the Wired, a rocket needs a fairing when it is launched with some payload. Fairing is essentially the rocket’s nose cone. However, the fairing becomes extra weight and is dropped to fall back to Earth after the rocket gets past Earth’s atmosphere.
The Wired said that the fairings, which are expensive components, are not recovered. For the Falcon Heavy rocket, it appears they can cost about $6 million.
The SpaceX, on the other hand, has managed to recover one of its fairings. It used a large parachute to slow it down. According to Teslarati, the Falcon 9 rocket fairing was recovered hours after the successful Starlink-10 launch on Tuesday.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has shared the rare and jaw-dropping video on his Twitter handle.
The 43 second long video with soothing elevator music shows the rocket fairing landing on the gigantic net of a moving ship dubbed Ms Tree.
Elon Musk shared video and captioned it “Aloha, welcome back from space.”
Till now, 6.5 million people have already watched video while 354.4K people have liked and and 45.8K people have retweeted it.
Aloha, welcome back from space 💫 pic.twitter.com/xWPN09Wtaw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2020
Ms Kalinga