South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
SpaceX Falcon Heavy set for liftoff in military flight after 3-year hiatus
Mission will be the first of three classified U.S. Space Force planned for the rocket
It’s the biggest game in town for now, but has not flown in more than three years. Fans of SpaceX, though, will have a chance to see what is currently the most powerful rocket in use launch on a secret military mission from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday morning.
SpaceX said it was targeting that date for the launch after successfully completing the Falcon Heavy static fire test Thursday night. Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex added the launch to its viewing schedule with a liftoff slated for 9:40 a.m.
“This launch culminates years of effort by a dedicated team comprised of mission-focused people from across the U.S. Space Force and
SpaceX,” said Brig. Gen Stephen Purdy on Thursday. “The Falcon Heavy is an important element of our overall lift capability, and we’re very excited to be ready for launch.”
What’s going up is the
USSF-44 mission, the first of three classified Department of Defense flights planned to fly on the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together using 27 Merlin engines to produce
5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The power gives the rocket the capability to bring payloads to higher orbits.
“There is a difference,” said Frank DiBello, president and CEO of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency. “You’ll sense it. You can clearly feel the vibration, hear it, and it’s impressive.”
Meagan Happel, Space Coast Office of Tourism public relations manager, said Falcon Heavy’s past launches have drawn between 100,000 and
150,000 people. “We’re anticipating similar numbers to the prior Falcon Heavy launches since this rocket is a rarity,” she said.
USSF-44 will be the first National Security Space Launch for Falcon Heavy with future missions USSF67 and USSF-52 booked, but without a target launch date yet, according to Space Force officials.
It comes more than three years since Falcon Heavy’s last launch in June 2019 that released 24 experimental satellites into orbit for the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program, and paved the way for these missions for Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
Space Systems Command, which has its headquarters at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California, is responsible for “rapidly developing, acquiring, equipping, fielding and sustaining lethal and resilient space capabilities,” according to a Space Force press release.
The mission’s satellite payloads are being put into geosynchronous orbit for the Space Systems Command’s division that focuses on innovation. While the entire manifest is top secret, one satellite that is making the trip is the
TETRA-1 microsatellite, built by Millennium Space Systems, a subsidiary of Boeing, for “various prototype missions,” according to the company.
“One of our primary goals is to be more agile in the development and deployment of innovative space assets,” said Space Force Brig. Gen. Timothy A. Sejba in 2020. “The partnership we’ve developed with Millennium Space Systems allows us to create and field a dynamic pathfinder capability to meet the future space warfighter’s needs.”
Designed to orbit at
22,236 miles, it’s 100 times farther away than the International Space Station. A secondary transportation system will get the satellites to where they need to be after Falcon Heavy provides the initial push.
The launch profile calls for more fuel from the central booster so that SpaceX won’t even attempt to recover as it normally would. It will attempt to land the two side boosters, though, at Landing Zones
1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which should bring a couple of double sonic booms to the Space Coast upon their return.
Falcon Heavy has only flown three times previous, with its first launch in 2018 sending up Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster, which is currently in an orbit that at times takes it beyond Mars. It then flew a commercial payload in April 2019 to put the Arabsat-6A satellite into orbit followed by the DOD mission called Space Test
Program-2 in June 2019. “You won’t see as many, nor will you see them be regular launches because they’re much more a function of the particular mission need, but knowing that you can turn to them and they’re reliable when you do is important,” DiBello said.
Falcon Heavy more than doubles the power of United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, but falls short of the more than 7 million pounds of thrust produced during space shuttle launches and 7.6 million pounds of thrust seen from the Apollo program’s Saturn V rockets.
It will also be outpaced by NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket that will produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which would make SLS the most powerful rocket to ever lift off from Earth, if it can get off the ground next month. NASA is planning a launch of SLS on the Artemis I moon mission as early Nov.
14.
Also in the works is the new SpaceX Starship rocket that when combined with the Super Heavy booster will leave Falcon Heavy, SLS, the shuttle and Saturn V rockets in the dust, capable of producing more than
16 million pounds of thrust through 33 Raptor engines. That could make its first orbital test flight before the end of the year as well from SpaceX’s southeast Texas facility Starbase.
For now, though, Falcon Heavy is the king of active rockets and ready to fly from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A.
“It’s always exciting to see a Falcon launch but a Falcon Heavy launch is especially exciting and even more so when you have two of the boosters coming back and landing on land,” DiBello said. “So it’ll be a spectacular day, and we hope for good weather and a safe flight.”