Sidebar

Exclusive Reports

29
Fri, Mar

Trending Now
Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

The world’s newest, most powerful rocket in decades is set to be launched. The Falcon Heavy rocket, built by the American private company SpaceX, is set to be launched for the first time Tuesday. SpaceX is in the business of making getting into orbit a lot cheaper, and Falcon Heavy is yet the latest example. According to the company, it will cost just $90 million per launch, a fraction of the price of similar heavy-lift rockets.

If SpaceX were run by anybody other than serial entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk, its last year might have earned it the name of another Musk venture: the boring company.

 

Month after month, the company formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launches Falcon 9 rockets without incident. Most of these missions include their first stages flying themselves back to a landing pad or seaborne platform, a feat of routine reusability that eludes space agencies around the world.

 

Tuesday afternoon, however, SpaceX has something novel planned: a first launch of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket built in America since the Saturn V that sent NASA astronauts to the moon.

 

SpaceX's founder has said the ultimate goal is to make humans an interplanetary species, by creating a colony on Mars. Falcon Heavy is a small step on that journey but it is still a very large machine. Weighing in at over 1,500 tons, it can carry more stuff into space than any vehicle since the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo Era.

 

On board this flight is a car made by one of Musk's other companies, Tesla. The cherry red roadster will be into an elliptical Earth-Mars orbit. At a press conference Monday, Musk said three cameras mounted to the car should provide "epic views", assuming the launch goes well.

 

That may be a pretty big "if." Although much of the technology in the Falcon Heavy is proven, it is a new rocket and things could easily go wrong.

 

"It's guaranteed to be exciting one way or another," Musk told reporters at Monday's press conference. "It's either going to be an exciting success, or an exciting failure.

 

This steady improvement has helped the Falcon 9 and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule become NASA’s primary cargo system for the International Space Station. Either later this year or early next, the Falcon 9 also has a chance to carry the first astronauts launched from American soil since the STS-135 mission closed out the shuttle program in 2011.

 

In the teleconference, Musk said he would no longer pursue earlier plans to use the Falcon Heavy to send crewed capsules to the Moon or Mars. Instead, he said those missions would go to a much larger vehicle in development called the BFR, short for “Big Falcon Rocket.”

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS