Elon Musk’s SpaceX launches world’s biggest rocket

Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launches Falcon Heavy rocket -with a red sportscar - after years of delay and $1bn of investment.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket today (AEDT) on its initial test flight, marking another coup for founder Elon Musk.

The blast-off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center attracted throngs of spectators and was closely followed by the global aerospace industry. It capped multiple design changes, years of delays and a roughly $1 billion investment by SpaceX, as the company is commonly called.

The closely held Southern California company defied industry critics by flying the world’s most powerful rocket since US astronauts landed on the moon almost five decades ago.

The 230-foot rocket, which featured 27 engines with the combined thrust of some 18 Boeing Co. 747 jumbo jets, climbed into clear skies at 3:45pm local time (5.45am AEDT) amid an enormous orange plume and thunderous vibrations. It was also carrying a redTesla roadster as a dummy payload and publicity stunt.

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy takes off from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Picture: AFP.

The launch countdown had been delayed for about two hours because of winds.

The rocket’s two side boosters shut down, then separated as expected less than three minutes into the flight. All other systems worked as designed, apparently without any significant problems, and the cover protecting the payload separated precisely on cue.

“Everything you could want in a test flight,” said one of the narrators on the company’s video of the launch.

SpaceX has revolutionised the launch business by vertically integrating operations, slashing prices and reusing the main engines and lower stage of its existing workhorse rockets, the Falcon 9 fleet. But throughout the years, Mr. Musk has remained singularly focused on a longer-term goal: devising mammoth rockets and spacecraft able to eventually establish colonies on Mars.

Currently over Australia 🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/HAya3E6OEJ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2018

The Falcon Heavy was conceived around the beginning of the decade to carry both heavy payloads and humans into orbit around the earth, and as a stepping stone to the next generation of rockets with enough thrust to roam the solar system. But on Monday, Mr. Musk surprised the aerospace community by disclosing that the company’s current heavy-lift champion, composed of three Falcon 9 boosters, likely will be reserved for unmanned missions.

Still, the Falcon Heavy could provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest commercial and U.S. government payloads into orbit.

SpaceX has evolved quickly since it was founded in 2002 with a handful of employees working out of makeshift offices in a converted warehouse, near a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb.

Today, Mr. Musk oversees a payroll with more than 5,000 employees at five locations spanning the US plus three different launch sites. The SpaceX team has sketched out plans intended to get its privately-funded, reusable vehicles to Mars a decade or more ahead of those being developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

SpaceX has confronted a string of accidents during its growth. It struggled through three unsuccessful attempts to launch its Falcon 1 rocket, a tiny, underpowered booster compared with later versions, before finally sending one into orbit in 2008. Six years later the company lost a Falcon 9 rocket carrying cargo to the international space station, when it exploded shortly after takeoff. A year later, another Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad during routine ground tests, destroying a corporate communications satellite and casting a pall over SpaceX’s ambitious plans as well as the budding commercial space industry.

But Mr. Musk and his team bounced back from all those setbacks, by redesigning part of the Falcon 9’s fuel system and demonstrating resolve to rev up the tempo of launches. “We did learn our lessons from both of those” Falcon 9 accidents, Hans Koenigsmann, who heads SpaceX’s reliability efforts, told a House panel last month. “We improved the vehicle.”

Had Tuesday’s launch gone badly, commercial and US government customers still would have been able to rely on a number of fallback options to put their heaviest future payloads into orbit.

A joint rocket-making venture between Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., currently the Pentagon’s primary launch provider, is developing a less-costly alternative with roughly 30% more power than its existing rockets, that is to fly in 2020. Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos is committed to working on a more-powerful rocket, called New Glenn, slated to be a direct competitor to both the joint venture and SpaceX.

And Orbital ATK Inc. hopes to use federal funds to help spur development of its own entrant in the competition, with a main stage fuelled by solid rocket motors, which could launch by 2021.

The Wall St Journal