SpaceX Successfully Launches Falcon 9 Carrying Starlink Demo Satellites (techcrunch.com)

SpaceX has successfully launched a Falcon 9 from SLC-4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base today, its first launch since its successful Falcon Heavy test earlier this month. The launch took off early Wednesday morning, after being rescheduled a couple of times from an initial target of this past weekend. From a report: The launch was primarily designed to bring the PAZ satellite to orbit (which was deployed as planned into a low Earth, sun-synchronous polar orbit), a satellite for a Spanish customer that's designed to provide geocommunications and radar imaging for both government and private commercial customers. This launch had a secondary purpose, however, and one that might ultimately be more important to SpaceX's long-term goals. SpaceX packed two demonstration micro satellites for its planned internet broadband service (which Elon Musk confided via tweet it will call 'Starlink'). These will perform tests required before it's certified to operate the service, which it hopes to use to generate revenue by signing up subscribers to its internet service, which will hopefully be globe-spanning once complete.

Comments

Also, new fairing successful

[JoshuaZ]

This launch was also the first launch of the new fairing https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/02/spacex-falcon-9-paz-launch-starlink-demo-new-fairing/. The fairing is the two halves of the nose-cone which protect the payload from wind when the payload is going up in the atmosphere (as well as helping keep the overall rocket have less drag). Once the rocket hits the upper atmosphere (generally about the same time or shortly after 2nd stage cut off, depending on the specific rocket), the fairing breaks off since it is extra, unnecessarily mass at that point. SpaceX has been very interested in recovering the fairings and the upgraded fairing is both slightly larger (which is good because volume limitations are an issue for the Falcon 9 and even more so for the Falcon Heavy), and is also aimed at trying to make fairing recovery possible. If they can get fairing recovery and reuse to work then SpaceX will have another way of reducing the cost of launches since the fairings cost a few million to manufacture. The fact that this fairing was used without any apparent major glitches is very promising.

Yes fairings are expensive

[sjbe]

From the article you linked: the fairing costs $6m? Really?

You are aware that economies of scale are rather limited here right? It's not at all shocking that something like that would cost $6m in the sort of volume SpaceX deals in. Plus they aren't an "inert chuck of metal". Per SpaceX it is composite structure consisting of a 2.5 cm (1 in.) thick aluminum honeycomb core surrounded by carbon fiber face sheet plies (see section 4.3.7). It will require a huge oven for the carbon fiber which you can be sure is expensive and a lot of fancy tooling.

It has to be light, designed to take quite a lot of pressure, shock, and vibration, and deal with temperatures, and it has to separate reliably. These are hard to make and expensive. In some cases the mission requires a custom fairing.

Article showing fairing recovery

[SuperKendall]

I found another article that has a link showing Mr Steven (the catcher boat) and the fairing (which Mr. Steven missed this time, but the fairing, er, faired quite well landing in the ocean).