SpaceX Falcon 9 Live Landing Attempt

[ORAC]

Rocket Report: SpaceX abandons catching fairings

Over the last couple of years, SpaceX has experimented with two ships with large nets, Ms. Chief and Ms. Tree, to catch Falcon 9 payload fairings returning from space beneath a parafoil. However, as the SpaceXfleet.com website notes, these efforts have not proven to be as reliable as SpaceX engineers likely imagined. "Catching" also proved dangerous to the recovery ships themselves.

As a result, SpaceX has transitioned to "wet recovery" of the fairings, in which the Dragon recovery ships GO Searcher and GO Navigator quickly pluck the two halves from the ocean after splashdown. But those vehicles are increasingly needed for Dragon missions, so as a result the SpaceX fleet is changing.

Both Ms. Chief and Ms. Tree have undergone a decommissioning process, and SpaceX has charted a much larger ship, the Shelia Bordelon, to begin pulling fairing halves from the ocean with its 50-ton crane. This, too, seems to be something of a stopgap measure.