SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Launches AMOS-17, Ship Catches Half of Payload Fairing
A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster launched Spacecom’s AMOS-17 communications satellite from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Tuesday. The company’s Ms. Tree vessel caught half of the rocket’s payload fairing in a net as it descended under a parachute.
It was the second recovery of a fairing half by the net-equipped ship. A full fairing costs about $6 millions to manufacture.
The AMOS-17 satellite was designed by Spacecom using Boeing’s advanced digital payload technology to provide increased connectivity to Africa. With its extensive abilities, flexibility, and reliability, AMOS-17 is poised to support growth in a variety of broadcast, broadband, mobility, and data services throughout the African continent. It is being deployed to the 17E orbital position, right over central Africa, to optimize service in the region.
AMOS-17 will operate in the C, Ku and Ka bands with a digital channelizer to provide fixed high throughput (HTS) C-band coverage to Africa, steerable HTS Ka-band coverage to anywhere from China to Brazil, and extensive Ku-band coverage throughout Africa with additional coverage in Europe, the Middle East, China, and India.
The satellite’s digital processing capabilities provide connectivity between all of AMOS-17’s beams in all available bands in any combination. These capabilities also support suppression of interference, flexible capacity allocation, and other digital processing features for improved service. Additionally, all command and control channels, as well as telemetry, are encrypted for maximum security.
AMOS-17 is planned to be in operation for a minimum of 20 years, enabling long-lasting and stable service.
The Falcon 9’s first stage was flown for the third time after flying during the Telstar-19 VANTAGE mission in July 2018 and the Es’hail-2 mission in November 2018. The stage was not equipped with grid fins and landing legs for Tuesday’s flight.
44 responses to “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Launches AMOS-17, Ship Catches Half of Payload Fairing”
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well done
but its curious…wonder how much it has cost to do this…particularly since this technology seems to not have any value once Falcon is finished 🙂
Around 2030.
if that is teh case then Musketeers are going to be really disaspointed…Mars 2022 or 24 🙂
Mars after 2032. The Moon is going to keep people busy after we return 2028 ish. In tin cans, the water towers should start getting there about 2030ish.
the Musketeers think other wise…to me its unclear where policy is heading…as for the water towers…well lets see them actually fly before we have them as star fleet
But it’s okay to have them as Starfleet after they fly? Oh, goody!
By the time anybody gets there in a tin can, the Muskovy Hilton will be looking to change out the worn carpet in its entrance foyer. As long as they’ve got a reservation, the new arrivals can have their lander re-tanked with propellant and given a complimentary clean and polish in the valet parking lot.
sure
There will be overlap for a long time. Especially for Vandy.
It wasn’t supposed to be this hard and take this long. In for a penny… It’s still a pallet of money hurtling out of the sky.
I read somewhere, some years ago, that a booster was costing them about 18 million dollars. I’ve seen Musk say that a fairing costs them about 6 million. That’s a third of a new booster, if I didn’t hallucinate that first number. It’s also a nice chunk of the 50 million they seem to be charging for launches with flight proven boosters these days.
to me it makes no sense. they are not going to have farings on Star whatever so why does this “technology” or method have any value to them?
I dont believe the booster cost them 18 million. I bet that is the second stage
Well, I have nothing to back up my 18 million dollar booster claim. I don’t recall the source at all. It could have been print or video. It was 3 or 4 years ago, I think, and the reason why it stuck in my memory at all was that I was surprised by the number. But I could be misremembering.
Musk has said that the plan is to run the Falcon 9/Heavy and the Starship in parallel for a while, until customers are comfortable. Perhaps that refers to the Air Force, though if they are skittish about trusting their exotic birds to the new rocket, one might expect them to also balk at used fairings.
Perhaps he’d simply prefer to succeed rather than fail. Successes are good for marketing, failures not so much. The shallowest of perceptions can affect outcomes in a market where the government plays such a large roll and various factions within government pursue conflicting agendas.
Stubbornness is a trait that has served Elon well over all, though sometimes it leads him astray. Cramming his Tesla factories to the rafters with robots got him into a literal jam. I saw that coming, because I’m a perceptive fellow.
Elon kept on stressing the unparalleled density of the factory machinery. No wasted space. I worked in industrial automation for 14 years, long enough to notice that what really keeps a factory going are the mechanics and electricians. But if there is no space around the machines then the maintenance staff will not be able to service those machines, so when the line stops, it will be quite a while before it starts up again. And then it will stop again. And again. You can’t work the kinks out if you can’t get near the thing. You need to be able to stand next to the machine and watch it run.
Elon seemed to think he was inventing production line optimization on the fly. “The machine that builds the machines.” That was a novel concept — in the late 19th century. It really caught on. They decided to call it Industrial Engineering. Universities started offering degree programs. They still do. Presumably Tesla had industrial engineers and they warned him, but he had to learn that lesson the hard way because he’s stubborn.
And that is why SpaceX is still trying to catch fairings. Anyway, it’s still a pallet of money hurtling out of the sky.
LOL. If the 2nd stage cost that much, the 1st stage would cost a minimum of four or five times that much given that it has nine times as many engines. That would make the whole rocket about twice as expensive as what SpaceX actually charges for a mission.
Or have you joined Kelly Starks and Gary Church in the “SpaceX is getting huge secret subsidies from the government” cult of wack-a-doodle crypto-finance?
The whole rocket costs $15 – 16 million. 1st stage is about $12million, 2nd stage is about $3 million, fairing is about $1 million.
If that’s the case then the fairing is super expensive.
Or a fairing doesn’t actually cost SpaceX $6 million to build and Musk said “cost” only in the sense of what it costs the customer of a launch. It’s quite remarkable how so many people – though I don’t count you among them – who express endless skepticism about every other word that comes out of Musk’s mouth are, nonetheless, still convinced that what Musk meant was that the fairings actually cost SpaceX $6 million to make.
I don’t follow SpaceX costs as you do. If a fairing s $1M, then a fairing half caught by one vessel would be +=$0.5M. At that rate, I am curious if vessel modification and operation is eating up most of the savings. Then learning curve and refurbishment costs as well could make it questionable as a direct investment.
At the cost you quoted, it seems like there might be a second agenda. Like suborbital payload recovery or research for something else down the line. Mainly, I question because I know nothing about maritime operating costs.
I’m no expert on maritime operating costs either. But the oil platform services industry is viciously competitive and the builders of such service vessels – which is mostly what SpaceX has in its “navy” – design them to be as inexpensive as possible to build and operate.
GO Ms. Tree’s original builder and operator apparently went broke and had to sell what was then Mr. Steven to the operator of several other of SpaceX’s leased craft. Mr. Steven was built bigger and faster than most such service boats, probably as efforts to improve their overall economics. Could be the original maker simply couldn’t build and find users for enough siblings of Mr. Steven quickly enough to keep its head above water.
So I doubt it costs more than it’s worth to recover the fairings. Remember, what SpaceX pays to build the fairing isn’t the key item in that calculation, it’s what SpaceX can charge the customer, on a pro rata basis anent the rest of the rocket, for its subsequent use. That used to be $6 million and seems now still to be about $5 million.
fairing is about $1 million
Funny, Musk himself claims they cost $6 million each. Where pray tell does your number come from?
Musk hasn’t always been very consistent when using the terms “cost” and “price.” Six million dollars is the pro rata value of the fairing vs. the other parts of the rocket anent its all-up price (not cost) to the launch customer. His analogy of a fairing being a pallet of money heading for the drink is accurate in that, if recovered, the fairing would yield additional millions if used on a subsequent customer flight.
Some years ago – before SpaceX embarked on its effort to recover and reuse fairings – Musk and Shotwell said that, once reusability had been fine-tuned, the customer cost of an F9 launch might fall as low as $5 to $7 million. That price would have included the cost – to SpaceX – of a new 2nd stage and a new fairing and still included at least a modest profit so it’s essentially impossible to reconcile that statement with the one from Musk to the effect that the fairings “cost” $6 million.
As additional evidence, I went looking for other large carbon-fiber objects that were at least as big as SpaceX fairing halves. I found some motor yachts with carbon fiber composite hulls significantly larger than SpaceX fairing halves with prices starting at a bit over $2 million. Fitting out a luxury yacht is a lot more expensive than fitting out a payload fairing.
Congrats on the launch and the fairing recovery! Was this rocket a collection of the oldest most worn parts? That’s what I’d want to do with it. But I would imagine all that’s all accounted for in the launch contract and is reflected in the price.
The launch was covered by a 50 million dollar credit awarded for the AMOS-6 failure.
OH! I thought they already re-flew the AMOS-6 payload and did THAT for repayment. Oh yeah this booster must have been a collection of every aged out component, high time engines, and rusty bolts. Which is just how a system like Falcon should be flown.
that doesnt make any sense…to be affordable it had every part on it that was still workable from the original flight and any refurbishment it would cost money to put other stuff on it
You don’t think it would have made sense to strip every low time part off the booster you could get, then replace them with the highest timed parts in stock? I guess I’m letting my ideas on how I imagine refurb to go. I imagine every removable part is take off, inspected, serviced, and put on a shelf to await going back on a ’empty’ booster shell that’s reconstituted, tested, and shipped out to the pad.
it is a third resuse booster (I think) and so I doubt there was much low time parts on it
when you get people stripping parts and putting them on another vehicle and then having to do integrating testing on the new installation…the money starts going up
I defer to your experience in this field.
What you have described is pretty much what automotive or aircraft engine rebuilders do. That sure isn’t how servicing is done in the airline business, as Capt. Oler well knows. That’s why he’s disagreeing with you here.
For airliners, every part of a plane has an inspection/service interval specified in either calendar time or takeoff and landing cycles. These intervals can also vary depending upon what type of weather the plane normally flies in. Planes that do a lot of short hops get serviced more often than planes that fly on transcontinental routes.
Ditto planes that fly in extreme weather/climate conditions. A plane that gets de-iced a lot, for example, is going to be subject to certain types of potential difficulties more often or sooner than a plane which flies in more clement conditions.
Those inspection/service schedules are established by manufacturers based on long experience with previous aircraft and evidence from the test flight history of the current aircraft, then are subject to future modification based on the accumulating in-service history of the aircraft.
I suspect one reason SpaceX seems “stuck” at about 75 days for a minimum re-flight interval with its boosters is that they are busily building a database upon which to base future cyclic inspection/service regimes – some of which are likely to be applicable to SHS as well as to the Falcons.
Aircraft makers can draw on decades of prior experience and tens of thousands of inspection/service reports on prior and current generations of aircraft. Rocket makers have none of this history available. SpaceX is in the process of accumulating such data as they are the first ones in any position to do so.
It is known that SpaceX did pretty thorough teardowns of the first few recovered boosters. What was found out from that exercise informed the changes that culminated in the Block 5. The Block 5’s are now being subjected to a somewhat less thorough, but still considerable, teardown between flights to track actual wear of particular components against expectation. When SpaceX has sufficient data, the routine Block 5 inspection/service interval can be expected to take a sharp drop as it becomes more aircraft-like in practice.
AMOS-6 got famously smashed up and burned three years ago. Nothing left to launch. AMOS-17 was all spandy new and factory fresh.
The booster used had done two fairly strenuous missions of the same general type – GEO comsat deployment – previously. The engines, though, should still have had a lot of future useful life in them. Upcoming Starlink deployments should give us a good read on how durable the engines – and the rest of a Block 5 – turn out to be.
I think SpaceX quit using any nuts and bolts that could rust after their failed first Falcon 1 launch at Omelek.
Well, this booster’s two previous missions had also been GEO comsat deployments and those are said to make for harder re-entries than most other types of missions. And there was a valve of some sort replaced after the first of the two hot-fire tests conducted. But the grid fins and landing legs were stripped off so those will likely fly again – perhaps on an otherwise new Block 5.
As Emmet says, there was no price for this launch. It was a freebie do-over to make up for losing AMOS-6 three years ago.
SpaceX can catch half the faring – good. Now they will need a second ship to catch the other half.
Not necessarily — if they catch opposite halves each time, they’ll have decreased their need to manufacture new fairings by half (assuming all goes well).
Of course, they may, as you say, get a second ship to get the other half. 2 halves would seem to be better than one, after all.
Another possibility could be trying to catch the 2nd fairing with the same ship — have one fairing come down faster and the other loiter a bit. I’m not saying they’ll try it, but it sure would be interesting to watch!
Finally, they are gently landing and recovering the other half from the water, as they have been doing with some other recent fairings. Speculation is they may re-use the water-landed fairings on their own Starlink launches (Might be more than speculation; Musk may have tweeted that the next Starlink launch will re-use fairing halves? I can’t recall exactly). Currently, fairing manufacture is a bottleneck to increasing flight rate, and SpaceX very much plans to increase flight rate over the next few years for Starlink. If the water-landed fairings prove sufficiently reusable, that would help them achieve their goals and possibly, depending on costs involved, even obviate the need for fairing catches. But, it’s still early days
I think if opposite half fairings can be consistently caught, it would reduce their manufacturing requirement by 1/3, not 1/2.
As for how all this progresses, I suspect we won’t have to wait very long to find out.
Another factor could be multiple reuses. It seems like, although they’ve targeted bigger numbers, a lot of their equipment has been coming in at being used 3 times, including the current Dragon, the block IV Falcon boosters (iirc), and perhaps the early Block Vs (this last booster [the second block V booster launched, I believe] was expended on its 3rd launch and it looks like the first block V booster will be used/expended for the Crew Dragon abort test on its own 3rd launch [not sure about that though])
True to-date. Cargo Dragon 2’s, though, are designed to fly five times each and the F9 Block 5 seems likely to advance beyond the three mission mark on upcoming Starlink deployments.
Right. They’ve got the 4th reflight of one already scheduled, can’t recall which one off the top of my head, but anyway, yeah, they’ll be pressing on beyond 3 uses with block V.
The issue with the early block V boosters may be that the first few of them still were using the old COPV design. They might be expending those early as the opportunities arise in order to standardize their fleet
we will see…anything is possible in aspirations
a curious data point will be if they do…if they dont then you can figure out how much the thing is really worth recovering
Weren’t they supposed to already given up by your estimation?
I dont think I have ever voiced that opinion. I certianly do not hold it
Ok, whatever you say…
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Surface of the water (and thus wind conditions) looks very calm.
Anyway, it sure looked easy! Congrats to the team that’s been working on this!
I wonder what kind of wind and sea state they will ultimately be able to pull this off in?
Very apt question given that this is being done in the often fitful and moody Atlantic. I guess we’ll just have to see how the stats stack up as they accumulate.