SpaceX Completes First Fully Expendable Falcon Heavy Mission
- by Gizmodo
- Jun 17, 2024
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A live feed from NASASpaceflight is also available, and it’s already live:
Doubleheader: SpaceX Launches Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Within Hours!
SpaceX had hoped to launch the rocket yesterday, but a storm blew through, producing hail, tornadoes, and lightning. A lightning bolt even struck the tower at Complex 39A, requiring SpaceX’s ground teams to perform additional checkouts of the rocket, its payloads, and ground equipment, according to a company tweet
. Lightning struck the Falcon Heavy launch tower on Thursday evening.
Photo: SpaceX
The Falcon Heavy rocket stands 230 feet tall (70 meters) and is composed of three reusable Falcon 9 first stages strapped together. It has two reusable side boosters, a reusable center core, an expendable second stage, and a pair of reusable fairing halves. The heavy-lift vehicle is set to perform its sixth mission, having debuted in 2018.
While Falcon Heavy is more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, it may soon be overshadowed by the Starship rocket, which made its first test flight on April 20
but had to be destroyed after it entered a fatal tumble.
The rocket will be carrying three satellites, including the primary payload, the broadband ViaSat-3 Americas satellite, which weighs 14,000 pounds (6,400 kilograms) and will be delivered to a geostationary orbit. The other two satellites, Astranis’s first MicroGEO satellite and Gravity Space’s GS-1 satellite, are also headed for geostationary orbit.
Since the primary payload will be placed directly in its distant orbit, the Falcon Heavy boosters will have to be discarded—they’ll fall into the Atlantic Ocean. Normally, the boosters perform vertical landings, but this job, with that extra push to geostationary orbit, will require them to expel their fuel, making a landing impossible. This will be the first time that SpaceX intentionally disposes of all three Falcon Heavy boosters, according
to SpaceflightNow.
Geostationary orbit, or GEO for short, is more than 20,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) above Earth, which is about one-tenth the distance to the Moon. Many communication and weather satellites work in GEO because it allows them to remain in a fixed position relative to the Earth’s surface.
Want to know more about Elon Musk’s space venture? Check out our full coverage of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket
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