Launch window opens in a bit over 90 minutes after I post this (6:27 PM EDT)
When I said "Fare thee well', that was a hint.
Bit bigger hint would have been "Fair thee well".
Mega-hint would be "fairings, come home safe"
On his Facebook page, Steve Jurvetson (major investor in SpaceX and Tesla) posted this:
At the historic Apollo 11 Pad 39A for the first reuse of a SpaceX booster (and first attempt at a fairing recovery). Go SpaceX and SES-10, go, go go!
Live webcast for the 3:27pm PST launch window:
https://www.spacex.com/webcast
Let's repeat the MAJOR NEW ANNOUNCEMENT part of that:
"And first attempt at a fairing recovery"
SpaceX has been planning to recover the fairings for re-use, for long time. The Fairings cost about $3 million total, so well worth developing a system to do it, if practical enough.
Here is a link to an article in 2015 about faring re-use.
https://www.spaceflight101.net/spec...ghts-into-falcon-9-payload-fairing-reuse.html
The article features a video from a GoPro camera onboard a fairing half, showing it slowly tumbling, the video stops before re-entry.
[video=youtube;4_sLTe6-7SE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_sLTe6-7SE[/video]
Of course, no details on how. Pretty much a given that the fairing halves use some method to stabilize perpendicular to the airflow, if they do not do so naturally. At some point, deploy some kind of parachute. Either conventional round chute, or steerable parafoil. After that..... speculations veer off in many different ways.... like two long ships with a massively huge net stretched across them to catch the fairings as gliding steered parafoils land them precisely. Simple sounding but also unwieldy. Plus how to get the fairing halves out of the net and onto the deck as no way could two ships maintain such extreme precision to do anything beyond traveling a straight line.
Most likely, for a helicopter slowly come in from a bit above, with a cable and hook, snag the chute, then rise up (relative to the chute) to collapse the chute so it won't catch air anymore. That may sound far out but actually not so much. Disagreement over whether a copter could then fly all the way back to the coast, 200 or more miles away, needing to fly slowly due to the drag of the fairing (which would tend to wobble a lot the faster it would fly sideways) and snagged chute. I think if they do it, that they might land the fairings onto a barge or some ship with a very large deck. So the copters could fly back without the fairings.
The image below is a speculative drawing someone made, can't find a bigger version.
Whatever they end up doing, it'll be really interesting to see just how, and if it all works out. Even if successful, I doubt they'd be showing this during the live Webcam feed. More likely an announcement first via tweet, and then some video posted sometime later.
I do think it is very likely they have tested this out in some previous missions and had at least one or more deploy the chute and land softly in the ocean (the fabrication is mostly composite, but enough aluminum to render them worthless if they get dipped into salt water. Still, I would have expected they'd have added air-bags to make them float and get one back anyway just to study re-entry effects. None reported to have been SEEN returned and there has been another ship that usually goes out, suspected to be involved with fairing re-use activities). So if they did do such tests and had successful deploys and soft landings, if there had been helicopters out, they could have done the air-snag. But being so experimental, they would not bother with that, just get it to work reliably first.
FWIW - one of several youtube videos about mid-air retrieval of spacecraft or other rocket launch hardware.
[video=youtube;3cnr3pX4tyw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cnr3pX4tyw[/video]
