When it comes to creating waves through sheer groundbreaking innovation, entrepreneur Elon Musk is indeed no slouch, and his net worth ($20.7 billion) is a standing testament to that fact. With a seemingly miraculous touch, he has dabbled in a vast number of fields, causing massive paradigm shifts across the board. Be it changing the dimensions of online payments or developing the latest generation of suave electric vehicles; Musk has created a stunning legacy – one that is now literally out of this world.
Elon Musk’s private aerospace corporation, SpaceX, is not a new name in the sector. They have been designing various forms of rockets for many years, with their Falcon 9 design particularly of note, having seen long-running use as a space freighter for carrying cargo to the crew of the International Space Station, as well as for deploying satellites. With almost half a billion dollars expended behind it, the Falcon Heavy is a souped-up redesign of the Falcon 9, with a pair of additional strap-on boosters. It was not easy to design such a powerful machine, and the project was almost canceled thrice. The central booster had to undergo complete redesigns to account for the added stress by the new boosters, and there was a myriad of variables that were not possible to considerably take into account even with the most thoroughly detailed computer simulations.
Boasting a massive total of 27 engines, the Falcon Heavy is capable of accelerating to Mach 1 in a mere 15 seconds, and its low Earth orbit maximum payload capacity is more significant by nearly 200% than that of the base design. It is the highest-capacity rocket currently in operation. However, what makes the Falcon Heavy unique is its reusable nature, allowing most of the rocket to be safely recovered for refitting after it returns to the Earth from its flight. Even the side boosters safely returned to Cape Canaveral’s pads after serving their purpose.
On 6 February 2018, the Falcon Heavy took flight from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launchpad 39A. Never before has a private company built and successfully deployed a rocket as powerful as this. Elon Musk, being no stranger to sensationalism, ordered for a somewhat whimsical payload for the Falcon Heavy for testing the rocket’s carrying capacity – his red Roadster, built and engineered by Musk’s very own Tesla Motors, with a mannequin in a SpaceX spacesuit manning the driver’s seat. The car has been safely released in space, and it is expected to remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun for millions of years.
Boasting a massive total of 27 engines, the Falcon Heavy is capable of accelerating to Mach 1 in a mere 15 seconds, and its low Earth orbit maximum payload capacity is more significant by nearly 200% than that of the base design. It is the highest- capacity rocket currently in operation.
The flight was a wholesome success. Despite launch delays caused by atmospheric turbulence, everything worked according to plan, with nothing mainly going off the rails, and no significant complications emerging; aside from the central booster hitting the water instead of the floating, landing platform because of a last-moment ignition failure. However, it was not enough of an issue to mar the rest of the successful flight, and the magnitude of this achievement cannot be understated.
After reaching orbit, Falcon Heavy began to transmit a real-time video feed from its exterior cameras, as well as a camera showing the Tesla Roadster inside it. As a nifty homage to Douglas Adams’s cheeky science fiction novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a screen on the car’s dashboard displayed ‘DON’T PANIC’ in glowing letters. With David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars’ playing in the background, it was a truly surreal moment, seeing the car against the backdrop of the Earth. The dramatic flair was perhaps not necessary, but it created a truly artistic moment that was made possible only through cold hard science and human ingenuity.
SpaceX plans on following up the Falcon Heavy’s success with the development of even higher-capacity rockets (dubbed ‘BFRs,’ with the B and the R standing for Big and Rocket respectively) by 2020. Ones capable of interplanetary spaceflight, bringing us one step closer to the realization of Elon Musk’s dream of a future where humans would colonize Mars.
Musk also hopes that the success of the Falcon Heavy would serve as an inspiration for other companies and nations, sparking off a new space race from which humanity would universally benefit. He is not the only pioneer of private aerospace (albeit the most influential one). Other names like Blue Origin (founded by none other than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), Florida’s Moon Express and Luxembourg’s Planetary Resources are already looking to make an appearance into the space scene in one form or another, be it through building space colonies, mining celestial bodies or creating interplanetary ‘buses.’
SpaceX’s success, while it did not come cheap, will go on to open a great number of doors for the company. SpaceX would now have a compelling selling point when competing for aerospace contracts for building satellites and such. We may even be looking at collaborations between SpaceX and government-run organizations such as NASA, with privately developed rockets like the Heavy being used as part of NASA’s flights. The possibilities indeed are endless. Even the Falcon Heavy has already been booked for upcoming flights for the US Air Force, and a Saudi Arabian company by the name of Arabsat. With each flight of the Heavy priced at $90 million, spaceflight has never been more economical. The Heavy’s success has revitalized interest in the Falcon 9 as well, and Musk expects to see rockets of both models in active parallel use in the near future.
With the success of the Falcon Heavy’s first flight, which more than 6,000 people toiled tirelessly to bring to fruition, the bar for SpaceX’s next steps, as well as those of its competitors, has been raised considerably. It is safe to say that humanity is one step closer to traveling to other planets. While we probably wouldn’t be building our homes in space anytime soon, it is safe to expect that SpaceX would go on to change the landscape of space travel even further with its upcoming ventures.
