SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket is set for liftoff Tuesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the heavy-lift launcher will head on an easterly course over the Atlantic Ocean atop nearly 5 million pounds of thrust.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket is poised for launch from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida between 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT) at 4 p.m. EST (2100 gMT) Tuesday during a 150-minute launch window.
SpaceX will attempt to place a test payload — Elon Musk’s road-worn Tesla sports car — on an Earth escape trajectory into heliocentric orbit around the sun.
Elon Musk tweeted a graphic Tuesday illustrating the various launch and descent maneuvers planned on today’s Falcon Heavy demo flight, including recovery attempts for the three first stage boosters and payload fairing.
The timeline below outlines the launch sequence for the Falcon Heavy’s inaugural flight. A final Earth departure maneuver by the Falcon Heavy’s upper stage is planned around six hours after liftoff to send the Tesla Roadster on a path into the solar system.
Step inside a prototype of Blue Origin’s crew capsule to get a glimpse of what space tourists will experience when the spaceship begins suborbital flights with passengers in 2018.
SpaceX technicians at Cape Canaveral are readying for the first launch of an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket configuration next week, a mission that will debut changes to make the launcher safer for astronauts and make it easier — and less expensive — for the company to reuse first stage boosters.
Four astronauts flying on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft reached the International Space Station late Monday, one day after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The capsule autonomously docked with the space station at 11:01 p.m. EST Monday (0401 GMT Tuesday).