MaxQAerospace: https://x.com/MaxQAerospace/status/1899451109355180053
Could you provide us an insight into what issues you’ve recently been dealing with on Falcon 9?
and also if you’re still on schedule for your planned launch cadance this year?
Kiko Dontchev: https://x.com/TurkeyBeaver/status/1899488103535923362
Sea states have been historically bad on the west coast this winter preventing us from efficiently returning boosters and fairings over Ro-Ro barge to Vandenberg. We can go over the road but it requires removing legs/fins to enable highway transport and is generally very inefficient. December - February are usually the worst months of the year for Ro-Ro offload at the Vandy Harbor so we should be through the worst of it.
While we are recovering fairings at a high rate, refurb hours increased due to the wind/sea conditions in the winter. Fleet health is improving rapidly though as we inject new fairings and speed up refurb of flown ones.
Booster recovery, by design, has less fault tolerance than the ascent part of the mission. The issue on 1080 recovery gave us a chance to learn and improve the reliability of the entire fleet hence the stand down over the past week.
As much as we love launching rockets, nothing is more important than safety and reliability. We have stood done multiple times simply to double and triple check the everything even if we could have flown that day. We put even more scrutiny on critical govt and customer missions.
Lastly, we purposely stacked the first quarter of the year to get ahead on our goal (170) for this exact reason and we absolutely can still hit the launch goal. Challenges are to be expected and the team is fully focused on keeping reliability and safety at the top of the list. I love how we feel that we had a tough February when we only launched 12 times 😂😂😂
Ro-Ro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-on/roll-off
Roll-on/roll-off (RORO or ro-ro) ships are cargo ships designed to carry wheeled cargo
This is in contrast to lift-on/lift-off (LoLo) vessels, which use a crane to load and unload cargo.