SpaceX Falcon Heavy: Elon Musk’s heavy-duty rocket ready for launch

Evan Gower September 7, 2015

SpaceX’s colossal Falcon Heavy rocket will leave the Earth later today, carrying one of Elon Musk’s own sports cars into orbit.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy: Elon Musk’s heavy-duty rocket ready for launch

The Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket to be launched in a generation, representing a major push by the private space company to advance long-range space travel.

Tuesday’s unmanned launch will carry a cherry-red Tesla roadster payload into an elliptical orbit that encompasses Mars’ orbit around the Sun. “[The roadster will] get about 400 million kilometres away from Earth, and it’ll be doing 11km/sec,” Musk told reporters on Monday. “We estimate it will be in that orbit for several hundred million years, maybe in excess of a billion years.”

The launch is slated to happen during a three-hour window beginning at 13:30 EST (18:30 GMT) today, although it could be pushed back to Wednesday if any technical glitches are detected. The billionaire entrepreneur has indeed acknowledged that there’s “a real good chance” the Falcon Heavy will fail.

The spacecraft essentially consists of three Falcon 9 rockets and, like those pioneering boosters, is designed to be reusable after launch.

When the Falcon Heavy launches, the first stage will be led by the rocket’s two side boosters, each of which is equivalent to a Falcon 9. Once these separate, it will be up to the Falcon Heavy’s central booster to carry the payload. SpaceX intends to recover the stage-one rocket boosters by landing them after launch. It’s all pretty ambitious, especially as the combined force of three rockets means that it should be capable of launching 63,800kg into low Earth orbit. If the Falcon Heavy ventures further afield, it will be able to carry less:

63,800kg to low Earth orbit
26,700kg to geosynchronous transfer orbit
16,800kg to Mars
3,500kg to Pluto

While these figures are certainly impressive, the Falcon Heavy is a way off being the most powerful rocket ever launched. That honour, impressively, still belongs to the Saturn V from the Apollo missions to the moon, which was retired in 1973. The Falcon Heavy is also behind a couple of Soviet Union rockets, but ahead of the recently cancelled European Ariane 5ME, as this chart shows:

Vehicle	Country	Mass to LEO (kg)	Dates operational
Saturn V	USA	118,000	1967-1973
Energia	Soviet Union	100,000	1987-1988
N1	Soviet Union	95,000	1969-1972
Falcon Heavy	USA	63,800	TBA
Energia-Buran	Soviet Union	30,000	1988-1988
Delta IV Heavy	USA	28,790	2004-present
Ariane 5ME	Europe	25,200	Canceled
Space Shuttle	USA	24,400	1981-2011
Titan IVB	USA	21,682	1997-2005
Proton-M	Russia	21,600	1999-present
Ariane 5ECA	Europe	21,000	2002-present

Respectable positioning for the Falcon Heavy there – especially as the N1 never reached orbit. And, crucially, it looks like SpaceX will go straight in as the most powerful operational rocket. spacex_launch

Hold your horses. Let’s see that table again, only this time looking at rockets that are currently in development:

Vehicle	Country	Mass to LEO (kg)	Expected
Space Launch System	USA	130,700	2019
Long March 9	China	130,000	TBA
Falcon Heavy	USA	63,800	2018

If the Falcon Heavy successfully launches, it will be the most powerful rocket in the world – but it won’t be holding onto the crown for long. Now that’s not necessarily a problem – there are different rockets for different purposes – it’s just worth remembering that, just like other areas of technology, there’s always something more powerful around the corner.

In any case, the Falcon Heavy is coming… as long as the launch goes according to plan.

Images: SpaceX