SpaceX Nose Cone Just Hit 40 Flights, a New Reuse Record

SpaceX set another reuse record on Saturday night, and this time it belongs to the humble nose cone. Hours after a Falcon 9 lifted off from California carrying 27 Starlink satellites, the company announced that one of the flight’s two fairing halves had just completed its 40th trip to space and back, the first time any fairing half has reached that mark (via SpaceX).

“Fairing separation confirmed. Today’s mission marks our first 40th flight of a fairing half!” the company posted on X at 1:52 a.m. PT on September 20. The flight was the Starlink 15-27 mission, which lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 6:47 p.m. PT (1:47 AM UTC) on Saturday. First stage booster B1093 also completed its 17th flight and landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You.

The record-setting hardware is fairing half SN155, an active half that first flew in February 2024, according to tracking by the spaceflight community. In roughly two and a half years of Starlink launches, it has worked its way from newcomer to fleet leader, passing earlier record holders along the way. At 40 flights, it is now the most reflown piece of rocket hardware ever to reach space.

That matters because fairings are far from cheap. A new Falcon 9 fairing pair costs about $6 million to build, roughly 10 percent of the cost of an entire Falcon 9 launch. Spreading that investment across 40 flights turns one of the rocket’s priciest single-use parts into a negligible line item, and across the fleet SpaceX has now reflown fairing halves more than 300 times. For Starlink, whose business model depends on launching thousands of satellites as cheaply as possible, every recovered fairing makes the megaconstellation less expensive to build out.

Recovering a fairing is no small feat. Each half is jettisoned minutes after liftoff once the rocket clears the thickest part of the atmosphere, then fires cold-gas thrusters to steady itself and deploys a steerable parafoil to glide toward a recovery ship. SpaceX first proved the approach with a controlled ocean splashdown after the SES-10 mission in March 2017, then graduated to catching halves in giant nets strung over ships like GO Ms. Tree, which made the first catch in June 2019 and the first double catch in July 2020. In 2021 the company retired the nets in favor of ocean recovery with dedicated ships Doug and Bob, and the first reused fairing flew on a Starlink mission in November 2019.

The 40-flight milestone also puts fairings ahead of their more famous reusable cousins. The most flown Falcon 9 booster has reached 37 flights, and even Space Shuttle Discovery, the longtime reuse champion, flew 39 missions. With SpaceX flying Falcon 9 more than 100 times this year, including the 700th Falcon flight earlier this month, records like this one are unlikely to stand still. The next barrier is 50 flights, and the lessons learned are feeding directly into Starship, which SpaceX is designing to be fully reusable, nose cone included.