The Bird of Prey “Falcon Heavy” rocket, created by the private spaceflight organisation SpaceX took off on February 6 — a milestone, having carried a car to mars and made use of a reusable launch system. This launch was ambitious, as it wanted to achieve lot of things at once, including reusing the second stage and using recovered cores.
Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket, can lift 64 metric tons (141,000 lbs). Falcon Heavy’s first stage is composed of Falcon 9 engine cores, whose 27 Merlin engines collectively generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at lift-off, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircrafts. The second-stage Merlin engine, identical to its counterpart, the Falcon 9, delivers the rocket’s payload to orbit after the main engines cut off and the first-stage cores separate. The engine can be restarted multiple times to place payloads into different orbits, including low Earth, geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO), and geosynchronous orbit (GSO) [SpaceX].
Falcon heavy become so popular as SpaceX managed to land two of its boosters at once, nearly simultaneously, intact. The first rockets utilized Throughout falcon heavy launch, included two flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters were utilized throughout missions for SpaceX over 2016 and then refurbished, which arrived in their proposed destinations then afterward decoupling starting with Falcon Heavy’s second phase and returning to earth, while the center booster should land on a drone ship off the coast but later Elon Musk confirms the middle booster of falcon heavy exploded after it missed its drone ship and hit the ocean at 300mph during SpaceX’s historic launch of the world’s most powerful rocket .
What was the purpose of the launch?
The Falcon Heavy test flight was meant to show the world that it is possible to successfully fly a rocket with three reusable boosters beyond the Earth orbit.
SpaceX planned to aim the rocket so the car released by Tesla reached the Mars orbit path around the sun, which was projected to occur about six months after launch.
Did SpaceX achieve its purpose?
The rocket took its payload to space, where its three cores divided from the fundamental module, abandoning the Tesla for a mission into space.
Two of the craft’s three reusable cores arrived back at Cape Canaveral, Florida, while the third crashed into the sea when two for its re-entry boosters failed during its return to Earth.
After the fact, Elon Musk that his car would probably wind up further away from the earth’s planetary group then intended after missing mars. In short, the rocket made it beyond Earth’s orbit – SpaceX’s essential objective – but missed its mark in trying to re-land its three cores and send Musk’s tesla to Mars.
Does that matter to SpaceX?
SpaceX’s failure to re-land all the three boosters is a concern for potential customers, many of whom may want to see a fully successful test flight before buying a slot on a Falcon Heavy mission. In 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launch, destroying a $200 million Israeli satellite, but the firm has since launched more than 20 Falcons for paying customers.
Despite its faults, the launch has still been hailed by industry experts as a game-changer because of its potential to lead the space race.
Where is the Tesla now?
Instead of intersecting Mars’ orbit around the sun, the Tesla missed by some distance, flying beyond the planet at an unknown distance and continuing deep into the solar system