At the end of January SpaceX plans to launch the Falcon Heavy. After many delays, Elon Musk himself admitted that building Falcon Heavy was much harder than anyone imagined, it now seems as though the rocket is ready for static engine testing.
It has been a long hard road to get this far, Elon Musk once admitted that when they were testing the SpaceX rockets, they had only enough money for one more test launch, it succeeded and the rest is history.
The Falcon Heavy is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle, consisting of a strengthened Falcon 9 with two additional strap-on boosters. The main core plus the strap-on boosters are equipped with 9 1D Merlin engines, The complete rocket is thus equipped with 27 Merlin engines capable of putting 64,000 kilograms into low earth orbit or 16,000 kilograms into trans-mars injection.
Merlin 1D engines and octaweb harness
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SpaceX's next mission before it can launch the Falcon Heavy is to launch the secretive NASA Zuma mission. This launch has been postponed before and is now due to be launched on 7th of January from Launchpad LC 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre.
LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center
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The successful launch of the Falcon Heavy, which by the way will have a Tesla Roadster in its payload, will open a new era of space exploration.
Falcon Heavy on Launchpad at Kennedy Space Centre
Lets wish them luck on this groundbreaking achievement.
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I definitely feel like the commercial moon mission planned for later this year is putting quite a lot of pressure on Elon. I think a lot of technological breakthroughs will take place since Elon has practically started a new space race with NASA. Even though NASA has the SLS planned they still haven't done enough tests to come close to Space x. I believe 2018 will be quite interesting. This was an amazing post, thank you.
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