Rocket carries SpaceX’s ambition into orbit
Massive payload is milestone in spaceflight by private company
From the same pad where NASA launched rockets that carried astronauts to the moon, a big, new U.S. rocket arced into space Tuesday. But this time, NASA was not involved. The rocket, the Falcon Heavy, was built by SpaceX, the company founded and run by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The launch of this turbocharged version of the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has been carrying cargo to space for years, marks an important milestone in spaceflight, the first time a rocket this powerful has been sent into space by a private company rather than a government space agency.
The rocket carried a playful payload: Musk’s red Roadster, an electric sports car built by his other company, Tesla. Strapped inside the car is a mannequin wearing one of SpaceX’s spacesuits. They are expected to orbit the sun for hundreds of millions of years.
The success gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Musk’s dream of sending people to Mars. To do that, he has described a new-generation rocket called BFR (the B stands for big; the R for rocket) that might be ready to launch in the mid-2020s. The Falcon Heavy’s maiden flight makes pursuit of the goal more plausible.
Musk’s visions include humans living both on Earth and Mars.
He’s part of a new generation of entrepreneurial space pioneers that includes Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has said millions of people living in space is one of the goals driving his rocket company, Blue Origin. Planetary Ventures, a U.S. company with a large investment from Luxembourg, hopes to mine asteroids for profit. Moon Express, based in Florida, sees a business in providing regular transportation to and from the moon.
For now, the Heavy will enable SpaceX to compete for contracts to launch larger spy satellites, and some experts in spaceflight are encouraging NASA to use private rockets like the Heavy instead of the gigantic and more expensive rocket, the Space Launch System, that is currently being developed in part to take astronauts back to the moon. “It basically gives them another tool in their toolbox for accomplishing the space community’s goals,” said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Colorado’s engineering school who previously worked as a senior manager of communications and corporate projects at SpaceX.
Although delayed by high-altitude winds, the countdown proceeded smoothly, without any of the glitches that have bedeviled the maiden launch of new rockets.
The Heavy roared to life, a plume of smoke and steam shooting sideways from the launchpad. It rose from the pad, with an impossibly bright glare of 27 engines beneath it.
Then a thunderous roar, traveling at the speed of sound, rolled over the spectators.
The spacecraft will journey through Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt over the coming hours. If it succeeds, Musk’s sports car will head away from Earth onto an elliptical orbit around the sun that extends as far out as Mars’s orbit.
Just over three minutes after it blasted off, the most suspenseful part of the flight was over, as the boosters dropped off and the second stage continued into Earth orbit.
Some eight minutes after launch, a pair of sonic booms rocked the area as the two side boosters set down in perfect synchrony on two landing pads at Cape Canaveral. The center booster was to set down on a floating platform in the Atlantic, but there was no immediate word on its fate. In the past few years, SpaceX has figured out how to routinely bring a booster stage back in one piece to fly again on future flights.
Once in orbit, the rocket sent back video of the spacesuit-wearing mannequin in the car with a hand on the steering wheel.
On the dashboard were the words, “Don’t Panic,” a nod to Douglas Adams’ book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.