A big rocket will blast off from Earth today. Big deal and so what? Just another rocket right? Well as it turns out this one is quite the game changer and will have some impact on the future of space travel. That’s a lot to be riding on one launch but Elon Musk tends to go big. In this article, I have listed a few things that everyone should know about this launch.
1. What is Launching?
The rocket that SpaceX is launching tomorrow is called the Falcon Heavy. Which is pretty much a large version of their Falcon 9 Rocket. More specifically the Falcon Heavy uses 3 Falcon 9 cores all strapped together into one. All put together this new rocket assembly can put about 140,000 lbs of cargo into low Earth orbit. That’s a huge number when you consider that last year SpaceX put a total of 198,588 lbs of cargo into orbit.
2. It’s cheap and effective
The Falcon Heavy doesn’t really cost that much to launch. Each flight will cost about $90 million which is a small number when we are talking about space. Remember that the Cassini program, the space probe that was studying Saturn, cost about 3.26 billion. Also, other heavy rockets are much more costly. The Delta IV heavy costs about $350 million per flight and has a payload of only 63,470 lbs. Simply put the Falcon Heavy can do more for less.
3. What does this mean for the future?
If successful SpaceX will now be able to put larger payloads into space. This will most likely attract the attention of NASA and be used for all kinds of missions including missions to Mars. That means that SpaceX could be providing the rockets that will take the first manned mission to another planet. Also, SpaceX has said that they are planning on taking tourists around the Moon using this rocket. This will open up new avenues of space tourism.
That being said if the launch tomorrow goes bad, which is not out of the realm of possibilities considering that a Falcon 9 blew up on the launch platform in 2016, then SpaceX could be set back for a long time. They would have to build new rockets and a new launch platform since no other platform can handle the Falcon Heavy or they could redesign everything from scratch. Either way, a failure will cost them a lot of time and money.
4. The thing you really don’t need to know
Even though this is just a test flight the rocket does have cargo. It’s carrying Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster. This isn’t really important and I don’t know why he put it in there other than to point out that he has faith in the mission. This isn’t something you need to know but people are bound to talk about it so I thought I would mention it.
The launch window is from 1:30pm to 4:00pm ET today. If you were planning on watching it you now know what’s at stake. If you are not planning on watching it at least you now know why it’s going to be in the news.
Below is an infographic with more information on SpaceX and the Falcon Heavy Rocket.
To learn more about SpaceX and the Falcon Heavy Rocket visit the SpaceX website.
If you would like to watch the launch live, you can do so here.
