Every Little Bit Could Help

As I said just weeks ago, Falcon 9 first stages rocketing not just up towards space but back down to land intact happens often enough now it doesn't strain my expectations any more. Where it had taken launching three of them at once to grab my attention again then, though, now just seeing news a new boat with another jokey name and a big net strung up on it was intended to catch the nose cone fairings that fall away above the atmosphere did catch my eye. At first thought, it didn't seem as much of a difference to the bottom line as retrieving nine rocket engines with all the tankage, plumbing, and other metalwork connected to them. Then, however, I remembered that when it comes to getting into space tolerances are tight and money has to be put into engineering. I once found some issues of Scientific American from the mid-1960s, with a three-part series on the mission of Mariner 4. One of the articles explained the probe was the first to return photos of Mars in part because the Mariner launched just before it had the nose cone covering it collapse during launch, and before ground control could manage to shake the pieces off and open up the solar panels the probe's batteries had gone dead; some hasty redesign work had to be done for Mariner 4. I have toyed with "counterfactuals" wondering if Mariner 3's handful of potential pictures could somehow have managed to capture a dry runoff valley on Mars instead of just the craters that had made the red planet look less interesting than it is right when the money might have been at hand to send people there in the twentieth century. On the other hand, the lone pair of Mariner probes that did manage to reach their destination together (given Voyager 1 and 2 were renamed from "Mariner Jupiter Saturn"), Mariners 6 and 7, still only managed to take pictures of cratered wastes in 1969 itself.

So far as here and now rather than an overmythologised past goes anyway, I did see a follow-up that the fairings had fallen into the ocean rather than the net. At first, I'd supposed they were much less able to target one point than a rocket stage; since then, though, I did hear they at least had parachutes attached, and more work might do something.