What is a payload fairing?

It is bigger than it looks in photographs. A Falcon 9 fairing is 13.1 m tall and 5.2 m across — wider than the rocket underneath it, because the satellite inside needs the room and the air no longer cares once you are high enough.

It splits lengthways into two halves. Once the air is thin enough that nothing needs protecting, pneumatic pushers and a release mechanism separate them and they fall away. On a Falcon 9 that happens at about T+2:56, roughly 110 km up — well above the Kármán line, so the payload is technically already in space when it first sees daylight.

The timing is a real trade. Carry the fairing longer than necessary and you are accelerating dead weight all the way to orbit. Drop it too early and the payload meets air it was never built to survive. The rule of thumb is to release when the heating on the bare payload falls below what it can take.

Each half is worth about six million dollars, which is why SpaceX goes to the trouble of fishing them out of the sea and flying them again. They descend under parachute and are recovered from the water by boat.

A fairing is only for uncrewed cargo. A crewed Dragon has no fairing at all — the capsule is its own aerodynamic shape and needs to stay attached to its escape engines the whole way up.