(Updated) All three boosters (* and fairings) recovered!
Elon, you magnificent bastard!
I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that this was make-or-break for this company and for humanity’s future in space. It’s full speed ahead now!
I would like to see Musk drop his involvement in everything but SpaceX and concentrate on Mars and our interplanetary transportation systems (
Gwynne Shotwell deserves credit as the SpaceX president and chief operating officer, also, she and the employees of SpaceX are the real driving force — if I were 30 years younger I would by gosh and darn be wending my way into working for these guys).
More here.
Still more here.
From SpaceFlightNow:
Weighing some 3.1 million pounds (1,420 metric tons) fully fueled, the Falcon Heavy fired its 27 Merlin main engines in the final seconds of Thursday’s countdown, shooting a plume of exhaust out of the flame trench at pad 39A, the site where all of the Apollo moon landing missions left Earth at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Moments later, the Falcon Heavy rose from the seaside launch complex at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT). A flickering trail of orange flame followed the rocket into a clear evening sky as the Falcon Heavy — the world’s most powerful operational launcher — arced toward the east over the Atlantic Ocean with more than 5.1 million pounds of thrust, rattling windows across the Florida space center.
When everybody was back safe and sound, the guy with the Tom Swift smile betrayed his relief with dry humor, as usual:
“The Falcons have landed,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted.
This may not be the pinnacle of the Falcon 9 design. Though I doubt that SpaceX would do this, in light of the Super Heavy/Starship development effort, but Gordon Wang writes in TheNextBigFuture blog:
Elon Musk has suggested the possibility of a Falcon Super Heavy — a Falcon Heavy with extra boosters. “We could really dial it up to as much performance as anyone could ever want. If we wanted to we could actually add two more side boosters and make it Falcon Super Heavy,” Musk said. This five-rocket Falcon Super Heavy would have around 9 million pounds of thrust, Musk said, nearly doubling the rocket’s current capability, and putting it in line with the Saturn V as the most powerful rocket ever built.
A SpaceX Falcon Super Heavy would have 63% more a launch capacity than a Falcon Heavy. This would mean a 100-ton capacity to low earth orbit.
Mr. Wang is a little wrong here, in that this wouldn’t be “in line with the Saturn V”, but would in fact far exceed it. The Saturn V first stage developed 7.1 million pounds of thrust. But watching four boosters land together instead of being thrown away? Priceless!
The future is such a vast place.
* They recovered both fairing halves as well! From NASASpaceflight(dot)com:
Adding even more to the mission’s secondary objective successes was the picture-perfect splashdown of the two payload fairing halves into the Atlantic. The fairings were plucked from the water by SpaceX support ships, and Elon Musk soon confirmed that these would be the first two fairing halves to be reused.
That first fairing reuse will come “later this year” on an in-house Falcon 9 launch of a batch of SpaceX Starlink internet satellites from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Exactly which Starlink mission that first fairing reuse will occur on was not revealed.
Bonus:
I rotated the above image, and it makes a perfect desktop background (unrotated, it works for phones). Click through the small image to the right to get to the big one, right-click that one (in Firefox, perhaps other browsers) to “Set as Desktop Background”. The image has nice dark areas top and bottom to put your icons so that you can find them.
Note: in the absence of images of the droneship landing, the featured image on this post shows a different Falcon first stage about to land.
8 replies on “110% SUCCESSFUL* FALCON HEAVY LAUNCH!”
Great video! I can’t find video of center stage landing. I thought that SpaceX would have posted it by now. What is the hold up on transporting ISS crews on the Dragon space craft?
Not really a hold up, it’s on the schedule. They still have to perform a high-altitude abort test (which will destroy a first stage). If I remember correctly, they will be using the stage that was used in the Crew Demo mission.
I believe they are also doing a bit of a monkey dance with the launch sites, configuring back-and-forth between FH and F9. I think the next FH mission is to be an Air Force payload, so this dance will continue.
It’s fascinating that we have a space company whose launch bottleneck is the availability of places to launch from!
The video of the launch, which continues through to the booster landings, is available at the SpaceX web site (www.spacex.com). Unfortunately, the video became unstable when the center booster landed, so you can’t see it actually landing, but it comes back showing the landed booster on the recovery ship. Amazing engineering!
They usually have an aircraft nearby. I expect video of the droneship landing to be available eventually. It seems to take them a few days to process it.
This never gets old, thanks for the posts Steve. I am right there with you working for these guys. What an amazing deal that would be.
SpaceX–especially the test flight of the Falcon Heavy–is what got me interested in space again after the shuttle program shut down and it looked like the whole thing might just be a pipe dream after all. But they’ve turned it into an exciting spectator sport, and I definitely get a rush out of watching each launch. Exciting times! 😀
I get shivers. Truly, Musk is “the man who sold the moon”. I really felt like this launch was the cusp that determined whether we were going to expand out into the solar system, or decay back into caves. Melodramatic, I know…but there it is.
Not very melodramatic, I think–we were close to losing space exploration as a cultural value. Musk’s focus and sense of showmanship have helped remind us that space is just dang cool. Likely someone would’ve eventually provided the same service, but it might have taken several generations or more–he’s kept us from continuing to stagnate.