Falcon Heavy first commercial flight soon

Last year, in its first flight, the Falcon Heavy three-stick launch vehicle boosted Elon Musk’s personal red Tesla into space (not everybody appreciated the élan that Elon demonstrated in using his car instead of a big block of cement). It went beyond the orbit of Mars (slightly) and will be orbiting the Sun in strange ways for some long time to come.

Within the next two weeks, the first commercial payload to fly on this rocket will be lofted into a geostationary orbit.

From Spaceflightnow:

…multiple officials suggested to Spaceflight Now the flight is scheduled to take off in the first week of April from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. CNBC reported Friday the launch is targeted for no earlier than April 7 at 6:36 p.m. EDT (2236 GMT).

The payload slated to ride the Falcon Heavy into orbit is Arabsat 6A, a powerhouse communications satellite designed to deliver television, Internet and mobile phone services across the Middle East, Africa and Europe. The spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin and delivered to Cape Canaveral in January for fueling and final pre-launch processing.

Owned by Arabsat, a satellite operator based in Saudi Arabia, the new telecom relay station will be parked in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator at 30.5 degrees east longitude.

On the first flight last year, the two side boosters landed safely but the center core crashed beside the drone ship. Musk explained why in a tweet:

Every attempt will be made to recover all three sticks this time. The Air Force has agreed to re-use the side boosters on the next FH launch, so that they “might learn about this whole re-use thing”. I hope they do, because disposable boosters are soon to be extinct.

This flight might have happened earlier, except that SpaceX has been (re)modifying the transporter/erector at pad 39A to handle the beast, after having been used to launch regular Falcon 9s. We’ll be watching, eagerly.