After seven years of announcements, preparations and rejections, the longed-for moment that SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was waiting for has arrived: the maiden flight of the company's new launcher, "Falcon Heavy". If the flight is successful, and Musk emphasized that there is a high chance that it will fail, the rocket will become the most powerful active launcher in the world. In the bow of the cargo - a Tesla Roadster car with an astronaut doll in the driver's seat, which will be launched to the distance of Mars from the Sun.
Update: The live broadcast from the launch has started, the launch is expected to start at 22:45 (Israel time):
Today, barring a delay for some reason, the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX's new launcher, will make its maiden flight. Ahead of the launch, the giant rocket, which stands 70 meters high, was lifted yesterday by LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If today's launch is eventually postponed, a window for its launch will also be possible tomorrow.
The heavy Falcon is a "spin-off" of the space launch company's workhorse, Falcon 9. The basic idea of its design is a regular two-stage Falcon 9, to which two additional first stages are attached that serve as side boosters. In this way, the launch capabilities of the heavy Falcon increase significantly, and if launched successfully, will become aThe most powerful launcher in the world today (Saturn 5 The legendary, which launched humans to the moon from the same launch pad jubilee years ago, still remains the most powerful launcher ever).
According to SpaceX, the heavy Falcon will be able to launch a payload twice the weight of the most powerful vehicle today, Delta 4 is heavy, at a third of the price - 90 million dollars only. Among other things, the heavy Falcon will be able to launch 63,800 kg to low-Earth orbit and 16,800 kg to Mars. These data refer to the maximum capacity of the launcher, which is possible only in a one-shot configuration, in which the first stages exhaust their fuel reserves and burn up in the atmosphere. In a multipurpose configuration, the launcher's capabilities will be significantly reduced, as the first stages will retain part of the fuel reserve for landing.
Watch: a simulation of all the stages of the maiden flight (including the Tesla car "on the way to Mars"):
If the test flight goes ahead today, the 27 engines of the first three stages will be ignited together and lift the fearsome monster from the launch, with a thrust of 22,819 kilo-newton, which is roughly equal to what 18 Boeing 747s create together.
Two and a half minutes after liftoff, two side boosters will detach from the vehicle and land back on a land pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The two side boosters in flight today are used, and previously flew as Falcon 9 first stages.
The central first stage will continue to burn for another half a minute, will detach from the upper stage, and will also land back - but on a marine rig in the heart of the Atlantic Ocean.
An upper rocket stage will continue the final launch stages, with the payload attached to it - Elon Musk's private Tesla Roadster. The upper stage will first put the car into an initial orbit around the Earth. After a six-hour cruise in the initial orbit, the upper stage will re-ignite its single engine and accelerate the spacecraft to escape velocity from Earth's gravity.
The car (and the upper stage) will be put into an elliptical orbit around the Sun, where it will reach at one point the distance of Mars from the Sun (but not Mars itself), and at the other point the distance of the Earth from the Sun. in a telephonic press conference held yesterday, Musk told reporters that the car will remain in this orbit for hundreds of millions of years, and perhaps even up to a billion years, and will sometimes arrive "very close to Mars" in this orbit, with a "minimal chance" of colliding with the planet.
Musk revealed yesterday Photo on his Instagram account, in which the red Tesla car is shown assembled inside the missile's payload fairing, which will protect it from the atmosphere during launch. A new surprise was revealed in the photo - an astronaut doll was placed in the driver's seat, which Musk called "Starman". The doll was dressed in what appears to beThe space suit developed by SpaceX, which is supposed to be used in the future by the astronauts that the company intends to launch for NASA to the International Space Station.
In an interview with Ars Technica, Musk emphasized that today's test flight may fail: "There are many things that can go wrong. A huge amount of stuff. I really want to emphasize that the chances of success are not super high... I feel super optimistic. But I feel that this optimism has no basis in fact. I feel like we have a two-thirds chance of success, but in reality we only have a 50-50 chance."
The Falcon Heavy, whose development Musk announced in 2011, was one of SpaceX's most complicated projects. Its first launch, originally planned for as early as 2013, has been repeatedly postponed. Musk said before He and the company's engineers discovered that they would not be able to simply "glue" two first stages to the main stage. Among other things, they were required to redesign the chassis of the central stage, so that it could withstand the heavy pressures that the two side stages would exert on it.
SpaceX emphasized that even if the launch is not completed with complete success - it must be remembered that this is an experiment. in the company announcement It said: "Even if we do not complete all the experimental landmarks that will be attempted during the test flight, we will still collect critical data during the mission. In the end, a successful demonstration mission will be judged by the quality of the information we can gather in order to improve the launch vehicle for existing and future customers."
Watch the interview that Elon Musk gave to CNN yesterday:
See more on the subject on the science website:
- The heavy Falcon came to life in a static combustion test for its 27 engines
- SpaceX presents for the first time the Falcon Heavy - which will be the most powerful launcher in the world
- Musk's Tesla car is getting ready to launch near Mars
- The space missions of 2018: from the world's most powerful launcher to the successor to the Kepler space telescope
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To the skeptic: nice analysis, but more than that: for entities that serve as an exclusive contractor for a government, it's worth increasing the costs all the time, and for several decades the price reaches what the government can hardly pay and only stops there. Every cargo manufacturer has an interest in working with an expensive launcher for two reasons: that the price of the cargo does not seem high, and that working with an expensive launcher involves additional costs that include more profit.
A competitive launcher will not only affect the launcher market and cause dinosaurs to close, but will also drive down payload prices.
It is interesting that one of the issues that Elon Musk addressed is the need to increase the launcher to save costs
This is the next missile that he is planning BFR which will be even bigger than the current heavy Falcon that he is trying now,
It initially sounds illogical, but the reason is that the price of fuel is the smallest price in the launch, the majority is the launch
Usually the charger overshadows the launcher of any kind in its price,
His description is a "cheap" piper plane for about 2 million dollars compared to the price of a modern passenger plane that costs about 200 million dollars
But the piper is thrown away at the end of every flight and with the plane passengers continue to make money,
So if you grow with the missile and have enough fuel left to land it and use it again, you save a huge amount of money, of course it depends on how much it costs to return the launcher to flight mode, but there is a reasonable chance that it will succeed in this matter as well. Today, its launch costs about a third of the competition for additional reasons of channelization But he wants to reach a tenth of the price of the competitors, the reason he has not completely conquered the market even today is because the field of satellites
Not really subject to market conditions. The bodies that launch most of the satellites are the bodies with the biggest pockets and the price of the payload is so high and the time spent on it that the attention is more to safety and other issues than savings
If it ends up being a long time, its low price puts the competitors in a very problematic position
But it is very difficult for them to meet his streamlining abilities that are inherent in the company he founded and they have been declining for decades when there was no real competition in this field.