SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets yesterday, placing the first of its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit.<\/p>\n
While the company did not plan to recover the Falcon 9 booster, it did attempt to recover the payload fairing for the first time.<\/p>\n
The payload fairing is a nose cone which protects the rocket’s payload from aerodynamic forces and heat, which detaches once the craft has left the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
SpaceX planned to recover the fairing by catching it in a giant net attached to a ship.<\/p>\n
The fairing was outfitted with directional thrusters and parafoils, which piloted it back.<\/p>\n
Elon Musk stated<\/strong><\/a> that the fairing landed a few hundred metres away from the ship, and the addition of larger parafoils to slow its descent should allow the ship to catch the fairing in future.<\/p>\n SpaceX placed the first of its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":249885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31750],"tags":[34625,49069,11375,48987],"class_list":["post-249883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-falcon-9","tag-payload-fairing","tag-spacex","tag-starlink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249883"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249965,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249883\/revisions\/249965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read:\u00a0Watch SpaceX\u2019s successful Falcon Heavy launch<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"