• Nach [Ohio]
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    6 months ago

    I want to know what those pieces are. They look suspiciously like foot rests but it doesn’t make sense based on a launch in February and the pieces falling into the farmer’s field in April. I guess it’s probably part of the second stage.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Well, I can tell you for sure they aren’t foot rests… There’s 2 reasons for that, first, the crew dragon capsule that actually carries people isn’t left to burn up in reentry, it renters, deploys parachutes and it’s recovered (preferably with astronauts). The second reason is that the dragon doesn’t use that kind of foot rest dragon capsule interior.

      The pieces look to me like they’re all part of the fairing. This makes some sense because the fairing has to walk a very fine line. It’s whole job is to protect the payload and not burn up in ascent, but then it’s supposed to totally burn up on descent. In practice, it doesn’t always work out that way.

      Also in the photo, look at all that gross looking black fiber coming off of it. I think that’s all partially burned carbon fiber composite. I know the fairing is made of carbon fiber, so that fits pretty well.

      As for rocket launch timing, spaceX launches almost twice a week. If this is from a fairing, it could be from almost any of those launches (excluding the manned missions, because they don’t use a fairing).