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In another installment of our SpaceX Stories series, we bring you a 2017 interview with former SpaceX employee Daniel Frolich. He was actually the very first intern the company hired back when SpaceX had just 15 employees and was located in El Segundo. The interview contains some interesting stories from the early days of SpaceX and also from Dragon development.
Elon Musk has claimed in the past that the extremely quick 24-hour Falcon 9 reusey might happen in 2017 or 2018. This was yet another one of his overly optimistic statements, because two years later, SpaceX seems to be far from achieving such a feat. So I thought about what it would take to reuse a booster in one day, what it might look like and what is preventing it from happening.
SpaceX’s fairing recovery efforts are gearing up again after a 3-month-long slow period caused by Mr. Steven suffering damage in late February. Luckily, Mr. Steven has now been fixed and should be ready in time to try to catch a fairing in about a month. In the meantime, SpaceX has been recovering fairing halves by landing them in the ocean. I have a theory that until Mr. Steven manages to catch a fairing, we’ll only see reused fairings on Starlink missions.
One of SpaceX’s many ambitious projects apart from colonizing Mars and achieve rapid rocket reusability is to build Starlink, a huge satellite constellation in low Earth orbit, which will provide fast internet connectivity around the world. This article provides an overview of all the important information about Starlink, and will be updated over time.
Maintained list of all produced Dragon 1 and Dragon 2 capsules and key information about them plus lots of photos. The list will be updated over time.
Over the past few months, SpaceX has been quietly preparing to launch the first batch of satellites for Starlink project, its global internet constellation. The launch is planned for May 16 on a Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral. More missions like this one could take place this year.
On Saturday, Falcon 9 successfully launched a reused Dragon capsule to the ISS as part of the CRS-17 mission for NASA. At a press conference that followed, we learned more about the problems that caused the delay on Friday, as well as NASA’s plans for Falcon and Dragon reuse. It turns out that by the end of the year, we might see CRS missions that will fly Falcons and Dragons that had been used twice before.
In another installment of our SpaceX Stories series, former employee Dolly Singh describes working for Elon Musk by sharing a story of how he inspired his workers after Falcon 1 failed to launch for the third time in a row back in 2008.
Tom Mueller has been designing rocket engines at SpaceX since the company was founded in 2002. He helped develop the Kestrel, Merlin, Raptor and more. But how did these engines got their names? Luckily, Mueller was kind enough to share the story.
During last week’s Arabsat 6A mission, all three Falcon Heavy boosters successfully landed. The center core has undergone a hot and challenging return through the atmosphere, yet it still landed safely on the droneship. Unfortunately, before the booster could be secured to the deck, rough sea caused it to tip over. Why wasn’t OctaGrabber used?
