SpaceX's New Beast of a Rocket, the Falcon Heavy, Is Ready to Launch
First flight of the Falcon Heavy promises to be a public spectacle, as NASA sells out $195 viewing party tickets.
(Bloomberg) -- It’s to be expected that Elon Musk and his colleagues will want to toast the first launch of SpaceX’s new rocket, the Falcon Heavy, after more than five years of delays. But excitement for the long-awaited launch has gone far beyond space nerds and Musk enthusiasts: The Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex sold out of all its VIP viewing packages, including $195 tickets to a party featuring a champagne toast and a commemorative glass.
The Falcon Heavy—the most powerful operational rocket in the world—is expected to launch for the first time on Tuesday. “I feel quite giddy and happy actually,” Musk said on a call with reporters Monday ahead of the planned demonstration flight, adding that he’ll consider it a success if it doesn’t blow up on the launch pad. The launch, originally scheduled for 1:30 p.m. from Florida, has been delayed to 3:45 p.m. due to high winds, the company said in a Tweet. If it doesn’t launch by 4 p.m., SpaceX has a back-up window on Feb. 7.
SpaceX’s new, larger rocket is a reusable “super heavy” launch vehicle that will allow the closely held company to bid on heavier payloads, such as larger commercial satellites and national security missions. It's not the rocket that could eventually take humans to Mars—that's the “Big F---ing Rocket” Musk announced in September. But the Falcon Heavy's maiden flight is targeting Earth-Mars elliptical orbit, bringing Musk's Red Planet dreams into reach.
“This is a test mission, so we don’t want to set expectations of perfection,” Musk said. Watch the webcast of the launch here:
“Falcon Heavy is a new rocket, and new rockets are a big deal,” said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group for the private space sector. “It’s a really big deal that showcases the tremendous innovation taking place in the commercial space sector.”
In terms of design, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s first new rocket since 2010 is basically three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, tripling the launch power. While one Falcon 9 has nine Merlin engines in its first stage, Falcon Heavy has 27. That’s more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which SpaceX says is equivalent to roughly 18 747 airplanes. It's twice as large from a capacity perspective as its closest competitor, United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy.
First announced in 2011 with an initial demonstration flight scheduled at the time for late 2012, Falcon Heavy has been a long time coming. The project took a big leap forward in December when the massive rocket went vertical at 39A, the historic launch pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center that sent Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong to the moon. Last month, SpaceX successfully completed the “static fire,” a key test where all first-stage engines are ignited and fired at full thrust while the rocket itself stays on the ground.
The Hawthorne, California-based company already has paying customers committed to flying with the new rocket, including commercial satellite operators Arabsat, Inmarsat and Viasat, its launch manifest shows. The U.S. Air Force also chose Falcon Heavy for its STP-2, or Space Test Program 2, mission. Falcon 9 won U.S. Air Force certification for national security space missions in 2015, and Falcon Heavy will go through a similar certification process after the test flight.
The cost of each Falcon Heavy flight is roughly $90 million, more than the $62 million price tag for a Falcon 9 launch. That compares with as much as $400 million for a Delta IV mission, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report.
If the demonstration flight goes well, Musk said SpaceX would plan to fly its first mission for a paying satellite operator in three to six months. If it goes badly and the pad is destroyed, it could take up to a year to restore the site before launches can resume, though rocket production would continue during that time, he said.
“It will be a really huge downer if it blows up,” Musk said. “If something goes wrong, hopefully it goes wrong far into the mission so we at least learn as much as possible along the way.”
Because of the experimental nature of the first flight, and perhaps as a way to burnish the spectacle, Musk decided the payload will be his personal Roadster sports car made by another one of his companies, Tesla Inc., that will be set to play David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on repeat as it’s hurled into the deep beyond. Musk said that three cameras would be mounted on the Roadster, which should provide “epic views” of the car floating toward Mars, if all goes to plan.
Musk posted an animated video of what the event could look like here:
And while excited space-fans are counting down the hours until the launch, it's what comes after lift-off that could be the most exciting. SpaceX, whose driving principle is designing rockets for reusability, will attempt to land all three rocket cores for reuse in a later launch. Two of the first-stage rockets are set to return to land, while the third is expected to touch down on a drone ship. The two side cores in the mission have already been used in previous flights.
The company has now proven about 20 times the ability to recover the Falcon 9’s first stage on land or on unmanned ships bobbing in the ocean. But the simultaneous three-rocket landing will require rocketry maneuvers that the world has never witnessed before.
“There was a time when technical people in this sector thought that landing one stage would be impossible,” said Luigi Peluso, an aerospace and defense consultant at AlixPartners. “What the space world has learned is that you should not bet against Elon Musk. He might get his dates wrong and his timing wrong, but he can continue to string together these technological marvels. And if he can demonstrate Falcon Heavy, it makes the Mars mission that more credible.”
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To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne Riley Moffat at ariley17@bloomberg.net, Aaron Rutkoff
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