Today saw another great milestone of awesomeness achieved: Our very own genius CTO, Boltonov, successfully performed the first fairing opening test.

As you may be aware from our earlier fairing tales, we were not too happy with the “fairing” provided by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket model. It’s actually more of a thimble housing the parachute, but that’s no fun. We need a payload department to put in our Iridia satellites to emulate Iridium launches, remember? That requires a deployable fairing.

So Boltonov and his team wracked their brains, went to the drawing board, wracked their brains again, and finally rolled up their sleeves to put the rubber on the road.

But not so fast: The first step was to make a completely new fairing. After a suitable polystyrene foil was found, the guys created a wooden mold. This gave the fairing its shape via a sort of deep-drawing process.

Watch how this was done:

The second task, though, was to make the fairing come “alive” – being able to perform the functions we want it to do. To achieve this, Boltonov uses a servomotor that, once a button is pushed, opens the lock on the fairing. The two rubber bands finally pull the fairing halves open. This would then make way for the satellites to be deployed. We’re at the prototype stage now. Watch the first test of the fairing opening up:

Here’s what it looks like on the inside, looking up into the nose cone:

And now is the moment when you can feel free to applaud, cheer and send emojis or, better even, beverages to us. Especially to Boltonov.