.SpaceX is about to undertake one of the most ambitious rocket launches ever seen.
The company will send its new Falcon Heavy – twice as powerful as the rockets in operation today, and the most powerful seen since the Saturn V was launched in the 60s – to carry a Tesla Roadster into space. Then it will drop back down again, landing its three separate parts on Earth with the hope of re-using them
Continue to monitor the upper level wind shear. New T-0 is 3:45 p.m. EST, 20:45 UTC.
6:49 PM - Feb 6, 2018
That's it! For now. All that's left is to see how the second stage gets on and how the centre core managed to land on the droneship. But other than that everything has gone exactly to plan – after the delay.
It’s difficult to overstate what SpaceX has just accomplished: it’s successfully introduced a new heavy rocket to the world, the most powerful in operation and second only to the Apollo era, all through a private company and at a fraction of a cost of other systems currently in construction.
Nasa is working on its own heavy launch system, called the SLS, but it is estimated to cost about a billion dollars per flight. SpaceX estimates that Falcon Heavy launches will cost about $90m per flight.
What’s more, just a few years ago the notion of re-landing reusable rockets seemed like a pipe dream, and yet SpaceX has made it routine, with regular landings on land and on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Today it managed to land three Falcon 9 rockets simultaneously, each dropping gracefully from the sky with a controlled burn.
It’s difficult to overstate what SpaceX has just accomplished: it’s successfully introduced a new heavy rocket to the world, the most powerful in operation and second only to the Apollo era, all through a private company and at a fraction of a cost of other systems currently in construction.
Nasa is working on its own heavy launch system, called the SLS, but it is estimated to cost about a billion dollars per flight. SpaceX estimates that Falcon Heavy launches will cost about $90m per flight.
What’s more, just a few years ago the notion of re-landing reusable rockets seemed like a pipe dream, and yet SpaceX has made it routine, with regular landings on land and on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Today it managed to land three Falcon 9 rockets simultaneously, each dropping gracefully from the sky with a controlled burn.
There’s still a mystery about the core rocket booster: it was supposed to land on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic, but smoke obscured the camera and then the feed cut out from vibrations on the deck.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch went pretty well this afternoon, with the rocket’s two partially reusable Falcon 9 strap-on boosters making successful landings at Kennedy Air Force Station after jettisoning from the craft three minutes post-launch. However, the rocket’s center core did not function as founder Elon Musk and team intended, and appears to have later crashed back down to Earth. Hard.
Per the Verge, after breaking away from its upper stage (the portion of the Falcon Heavy carrying its Tesla Roadster payload), the core experienced engine problems. It didn’t quite miss the remotely piloted ship where it was supposed to land, exactly, but neither the core or the ship survived intact:
The center core was only able to relight one of the three engines necessary to land, and so it hit the water at 300 miles per hour. Two engines on the drone ship were taken out when it crashed, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press call after the rocket launch. ???
According to Engadget, Musk said the core landed some 100 meters from the ship but that a massive spray of shrapnel did indeed make contact. There apparently may be video of the crash, but Musk said that depends on if “the cameras didn’t get blown up as well.”
Sounds like the core is scrap at the bottom of the ocean. That’s certainly not ideal, but it’s also a relatively minor mishap given the Falcon Heavy set history as the most powerful rocket currently in operation and successfully sent the Roadster on its path towards the rest of the solar system. Plenty of rockets exploded or slammed into the ground on SpaceX’s path to today, and it’s likely they will continue to do so as Musk and team continue development.
Regardless of the fate of the last rocket section, the launch demonstrates the Falcon Heavy can successfully deliver a payload instead of breaking up due to “unanticipated vibrational resonances,” which is what matters to paying customers. According to Space.com, SpaceX already has two commercial launches using the rocket scheduled for 2018, the Arabsat 6A communications satellite and a U.S. Air Force mission which will also carry a solar-sail experiment. As TechCrunch noted, the end goal is for Musk’s company to be able to “turn rockets around in less than 24 hours and have reflown boosters go up twice in one day.”
According to Musk, his Roadster is well on track to exceed Mars orbit and will come close to the orbit of the minor planet Ceres in the asteroid belt, where it could potentially orbit for hundreds of millions of years barring a collision with another spaceborne object.
Alisoncc wrote:Wonder how many G it pulled on lift off.
OFSO wrote:I think the guys on board found the longitudinal vibrations (that means x-axis to astronauts, or
up and down to you engineers) caused by inconsistent burning harder to take than the g forces.
CacoThe demonstration satellites, named Tintin A and Tintin B, are being used to test SpaceX's future Starlink broadband service. Once all the necessary testing has been completed, the launch of operational satellites could begin sometime in 2019.
SpaceX's ultimate goal is to provide gigabit broadband worldwide, but the first tasks for these demo satellites are a bit simpler. Musk also tweeted that the satellites "will attempt to beam 'hello world'... when they pass near LA" on Friday morning....
Falcon 9 launch
The satellites were deployed this morning from SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Check out our earlier coverage for more on that launch. It was originally scheduled for Saturday, February 17 but was delayed a couple of times.
For more on the topic of SpaceX's broadband plans, see our article from last week. According to the plan, SpaceX's satellites will have low Earth orbits, allowing them to provide Internet service with latency similar to cable and fiber services. That should make SpaceX broadband a lot more pleasant to use than existing satellite services.
SpaceX plans to launch operational satellites in phases over a five-year period and reach full capacity with 4,425 satellites in 2024. SpaceX has also proposed an additional 7,500 satellites operating even closer to the ground, saying that this will boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas.
