PayPal billionaire’s £64m lift-off for Mars
Maverick entrepreneur launches new era of space travel (and his own electric car) into orbit
WITH a burst of flame visible, appropriately, from space, the most powerful rocket to leave Earth since the Apollo missions of the early Seventies launched successfully from Florida last night.
The Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, developed by flamboyant technology billionaire Elon Musk, took with it the hopes of a bold new era of space exploration that could one day take humans to Mars.
While its maiden flight at 8.45pm British time may not match the achievement of landing the first man on the Moon – at least Mr Musk earned the distinction of sending the first road-legal sports car into space.
Although Falcon Heavy can lift a spacecraft the size of a fully laden 737 jet, the 230ft rocket’s symbolic first payload was Mr Musk’s own cherry-red Tesla Roadster electric car.
After the rocket left the Earth’s atmosphere, the £72,000 convertible car was due to be released in the early hours this morning, complete with a crash dummy nicknamed Starman in the driver’s seat and the David Bowie song Space Oddity playing on a loop on its stereo.
It even has a copy of the Douglas Adams novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in the glovebox.
The roadster, which had a top speed of 125mph on Earth, will enter a solar orbit that will take it past Mars at seven miles a second – or 25,200mph.
Last night, Mr Musk, 46, said it was a ‘red car for a red planet’, referring to Mars, which he hopes to colonise one day using his SpaceX firm.
The South African, who also founded Tesla and the payment service PayPal, has also had the car fitted with cameras to send images back to Earth.
He hopes the Falcon Heavy flight will open up the prospect of far cheaper space launches, which could make travel to Mars more affordable.
The rocket’s three Falcon 9 boosters are reusable and can return to Earth and land upright under their own steam.
Mr Musk estimates each Falcon Heavy launch will cost £64million – nearly five times cheaper than its closest competitor in a rapidly expanding industry. It can carry 64 tonnes – more than two and half times as much as the old Space Shuttle. Mr Musk believes the survival of mankind depends on establishing a selfsustaining civilisation on Mars – which he calls ‘humanity’s only viable refuge’ – before life on Earth is wiped out by a catastrophe such as an asteroid strike, immense volcano eruption, or a killer virus.
He said: ‘We’ve got to get off this rock soon or face oblivion.’
Watched by an estimated 500,000 people on the ground, Falcon Heavy took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida – on the same launchpad at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre as the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that first landed men on the moon.
Apollo 11 crew member Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, was among those who saw Falcon Heavy lift off, powered by three boosters and 27 Merlin engines – named after the famous Rolls-Royce engines that powered the Spitfire in the Second World War.
The rocket exerts a thrust at liftoff of 18 Boeing 747 jumbo jets at full throttle.
The launch was particularly tense following the failure of a SpaceX take-off in 2016, when a 604- ton Falcon 9 carrying a £144million communications satellite blew up as it was being loaded with highly combustible fuel. The explosion was so huge it could be heard 40 miles away, and the plume of smoke showed up on weather radar.
But last night’s launch went like clockwork. After the Falcon Heavy rocket launched, the bottom section consisting of the three boosters, which contains the main fuel tank and engines, started to detach just two and a half minutes into the flight.
Thrusters on the sides of the boosters then flipped them over so that, as they curved round to reapproach Earth, the engines are facing downwards. Fins deployed from the sides to guide them home, with the engines slowing their descent. They returned to
Earth, landing back at Cape Canaveral. Half a minute later the core booster detached, landing on a ship out at sea. The remaining top section of the rocket then continued, taking the sports car into orbit.
Just last month, Donald Trump signed a proclamation committing the US to a series of space missions that would go to the Moon, to Mars and ‘perhaps someday to many worlds beyond’.
The Falcon Heavy is an important first step, says an excited space industry.
SpaceX, which Mr Musk founded in 2002 and into which he has sunk billions of his £14billion fortune, has already proved the commercial viability of the reusable rocket technology with its Falcon 9 rocket.
Individual Falcon 9s are already being used to place satellites in orbit. The Falcon Heavy has been developed to take much larger loads into space.
Mr Musk, who named the Falcon rockets after the Millennium Falcon spacecraft in Star Wars, may sound like a sci fi-obsessed eccentric but he’s also a sharp businessman who is deadly serious about Earthmen becoming Martians.
But before we can do that, space travel must become cheaper. The Apollo missions cost an astonishing 5 per cent of the US federal budget in the Sixties.
Mr Musk also wants to build bigger, more powerful rockets to go far further. SpaceX is working on a new rocket engine, the Raptor, powered not by the kerosene used in his existing rockets, but by liquid methane.
As this is easily made from carbon dioxide and ice – both of which exist on Mars – a methane-powered spacecraft could not only reach our closest planet but also refuel and then make the return journey.
Mr Musk is not alone in looking to populate space. In what’s been dubbed the ‘nerd space race’, he’s competing with other technology barons, led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to get into space first and eventually build colonies beyond the Earth.
Nasa is creating its own heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, to send humans back to the Moon and even to Mars. India sent a probe to Mars in 2014 and China plans to send astronauts to the moon and, eventually, to Mars.
The fictional astronaut Major Tom in Space Oddity ends up floating off helplessly into deep space. The space industry desperately hopes the Falcon Heavy mission doesn’t meet the same fate.