SpaceX successfully
launched the Falcon Heavy on February 6, 2018, at 3:45pm EST (20:45 UTC).
Through a waterfall of cascading fire
and smoke, SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon Heavy, the most
powerful rocket in operation anywhere in the world, and second only in strength
to the Apollo-era leviathans that took crews to the moon. SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon Heavy
rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the live stream of the event was the
second biggest in YouTube’s history. The event reached over 2.3 million
concurrent views on YouTube, coming in second to the Red Bull Stratos jump,
which racked in a ridiculous 8 million concurrent views back in 2012.
Earlier,
America's SpaceX company successfully conducted a key test ahead of the maiden
flight of its new rocket - the Falcon Heavy.
Falcon Heavy is a reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle designed and
manufactured by SpaceX. It is a variant
of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and consists of a strengthened Falcon 9 rocket
core with two additional Falcon 9 first stages as strap-on boosters. As of date, Falcon Heavy is the world's highest capacity
rocket superseding the Delta IV Heavy payload to LEO
by over a factor of two. Falcon Heavy was designed from the outset to carry
humans into space and would enable crewed missions to the Moon or Mars. The dummy payload on its maiden flight was
SpaceX founder Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster and a mannequin in a spacesuit
nicknamed Starman.
In what is known as
a static firing, all 27 engines on the launcher's first stage were ignited
together to check they are flight-ready. The procedure, conducted in Florida,
lasted only seconds and the rocket was clamped to keep it on the ground. So in
news everywhere is - US entrepreneur
Elon Musk launching his new rocket, the
Falcon Heavy, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mammoth vehicle -
the most powerful since the shuttle system - lifted clear of its pad without
incident to soar high over the Atlantic Ocean. It was billed as a risky test
flight in advance of the lift-off.
The SpaceX CEO said
the challenges of developing the new rocket meant the chances of a successful
first outing might be only 50-50. With this debut, the Falcon Heavy aims to
become the most capable launch vehicle available. The aim was to send the car
and mannequin towards Mars' orbit It is designed to deliver a maximum payload
to low-Earth orbit of 64 tonnes - the equivalent of putting five London double-decker
buses in space. Such performance is slightly more than double that of the
world's next most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy - but at one third of the
cost, says Mr Musk. For this
experimental and uncertain mission, however, he decided on a much smaller and
whimsical payload - his old cherry-red Tesla sports car. A space-suited mannequin was strapped in the
driver's seat, and the radio set to play David Bowie's classic hit Space Oddity
on a loop.
If all phases of
the flight are successful - and that will not be known until at least 6.5 hours
after lift-off - the Tesla and its passenger will be despatched into an elliptical
orbit around the Sun that reaches out as far as the Planet Mars. Later news
state that two boosters have come back
to touchdown zones on the Florida coast just south of Kennedy; the third
booster was due to settle on a drone ship stationed several hundred kilometres
out at sea. During the launch, the video
signal from the drone ship was lost, so the fate of the third booster is not
yet clear. The upper-stage of the Falcon
Heavy, with its Tesla cargo, began what hopefully will be an escape trajectory
to Mars' orbit. That requires the engine on the upper-stage to fire on three
separate occasions, with the third and final ignition only occurring after a
long cruise phase.
Mr
Musk warned before the flight that this was one of the phases he was most
concerned would not work properly. The upper-stage has to pass through a
concentrated region of radiation above the Earth, known as the Van Allen Belts,
and this could interfere with electronic systems. "It'll be game-over for all other
heavy-lift rockets," he told reporters on Monday. "It'll be like
trying to sell an aircraft where one aircraft company has a reusable aircraft
and all the other companies had aircraft that were single-use where you would
parachute out at your destination and the plane would crash-land randomly
somewhere. Crazy as that sounds - that's how the rocket business works."
Further update puts
it that though the Falcon Heavy’s outer cores successfully landed after launch
this afternoon, the middle core of SpaceX’s huge rocket missed the drone ship
where it was supposed to land, a source tells The Verge. SpaceX later confirmed
The Verge’s reporting in a press conference. The center core was only able to
relight one of the three engines necessary to land, and so it hit the water at
300 miles per hour. Two engines on the drone ship were taken out when it
crashed, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press call after the rocket launch. It’s
a small hiccup in an otherwise successful first flight.
The man
at the start - Elon Reeve Musk is a South African American business magnate,
investor, engineer, and inventor. He is
the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product
architect of Tesla Inc.; co-chairman of OpenAI; founder and CEO of Neuralink,
and founder of The Boring Company. He is also a co-founder and former chairman
of SolarCity, co-founder of Zip2, and founder of X.com, which merged with
Confinity and took the name PayPal. In
December 2016, Musk was ranked 21st on the Forbes list of The World's Most
Powerful People. As of January 2018, Musk has a net worth of $20.9 billion, and
is listed by Forbes as the 53rd richest person in the world. His goals include reducing global warming
through sustainable energy production and consumption, and reducing the
"risk of human extinction" by establishing a human colony on Mars. In
addition to his primary business pursuits, he has envisioned a high-speed
transportation system known as the Hyperloop, and has proposed a vertical
take-off and landing supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion,
known as the Musk electric jet.
With regards - S. Sampathkumar
7th Feb
2018.
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