SpaceX had one more victory this evening in its historical reuse of a rocket: it also landed the nose cone on top of the rocket that surrounds the payload to keep it safe, called a fairing. This is a first for SpaceX.
You can think of the fairing like a hard protective bubble atop the rocket. So it’s big: 5 meters — or more than 16 feet — in diameter. Fairing recovery has been a target for SpaceX for at least a year; Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, mentioned fairing retrieval as a goal in April 2016.
Fairings can cost a couple million dollars each
That’s because those nose cones, which are made of carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb, can cost a couple million dollars each, according to Musk. Being able to recover fairings is another step toward cheaper, multi-use rockets.
About three and a half minutes after liftoff, the fairing split in two and began to fall toward Earth — as it was designed to do. These parts have their own thruster systems, and when they’ve slowed enough, they deploy parachutes to land.