MUSK’S FALCON HEAVY HEADS TOWARDS MARS
CAPE CANAVERAL: The world’s most powerful rocket, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, blasted off on Tuesday on its highly anticipated maiden test flight, carrying chief executive officer Elon Musk’s cherry-red Tesla Roadster towards an orbit near Mars.
Screams and cheers erupted at mission control here as the massive rocket fired its 27 engines and rumbled into the sky over the same National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) launch pad that served as a base for US missions to the Moon four decades ago.
“The mission went as well as one could have hoped,” Musk said after the launch, calling it “probably the most exciting thing I have seen ever”.
“I had this image of a giant explosion on the pad with a wheel bouncing down the road with the Tesla logo landing somewhere.
“Fortunately, that was not what happened.”
Loaded with a Tesla and a mannequin in a spacesuit, the rocket’s historic test voyage captured the world’s imagination.
SpaceX’s webcast showed the Tesla Roadster soaring into space, as David Bowie’s Space Oddity played in the background, with the words “Don’t Panic”, visible on the dashboard, in an apparent nod to the sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The Roadster was outfitted with a data storage unit containing Isaac Asimov’s science fiction book series, the Foundation trilogy, and a plaque bearing the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees.
Musk posted a live video showing the Starman mannequin appearing to cruise, its gloved hand on the wheel, through the darkness of space, with the Earth’s image reflected on the car’s glossy red surface.
He tweeted on Tuesday night that the rocket’s upper stage had made a successful final burn, sending the car and its mannequin passenger out of Earth’s orbit, into an orbit around the Sun that brings it close to Mars.
After surviving a five-hour journey through the Van Allen Belt — a region of high radiation — the car embarks on a journey through space that could last a billion years and take it as far as 400 million km from Earth, the same as a trip around the equator 10,000 times.
“Maybe it will be discovered by some future alien race,” Musk said.
“What were these guys doing? Did they worship this car?”
About two minutes into the flight, the two side boosters peeled away from the centre core and made their way back toward Earth for an upright landing.
Both rockets landed side by side in unison on launch pads, live video images showed.
However, the third, centre booster failed to land on an ocean platform — known as a droneship — as planned.