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SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the tall launch vehicle known for its thrusters’ aerial acrobatics and synchronized landings when returning to Earth, took to the skies on Sunday, delivering national security payloads into orbit for the american army.
The mission, named USSF-67, lifted off at 5:56 pm ET from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the fifth successful flight of the rocket recently dethroned as the world’s most powerful operational launch vehicle. That mission was initially announced to launch on Saturday, and the reason for the one-day delay was not immediately clear.
The Falcon Heavy debuted to much fanfare in 2018 when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attached his personal Tesla Roadster as a test payload to the launch. The car is still in space, making an oblong path around the sun that oscillates into the orbital path of Mars.
The rocket followed this test mission with two launches in 2019 before taking a three-year hiatus; the vast majority of SpaceX missions do not require the increased power of the Falcon Heavy. On the other hand, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched more than 60 times in 2022 alone, sending two groups of astronauts into space, as well as Starlink satellites and a variety of other spacecraft.
But now SpaceX is getting the lucrative military launch contracts it signed for the Falcon Heavy years ago. The rocket returned to flight in November with the launch of the US Army’s USSF-44 mission, and Sunday’s liftoff was a follow-up to that display.
“USSF-44 included six payloads on one satellite that advanced communications, space weather sensing and other technologies in near-geosynchronous orbits,” according to the Army’s Space Operations Command.
And USSF-67 will make use of the same type of spacecraft deployed in USSF-44, called the LDPE, which is essentially an outer space bus that can carry smaller satellites. The Falcon Heavy also carried a communications satellite, called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, for the US Space Force.
Additional details about the satellites on Sunday’s mission were not immediately available.
With each launch, the Falcon Heavy rocket puts on a spectacular show on Earth.
After Sunday’s mission, the company retrieved two of the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first-stage boosters — the tall white sticks that are attached to give the rocket its biggest thrust at liftoff. After most of their fuel was spent, the side thrusters moved away from the central core and reoriented to cut through Earth’s atmosphere.
As they approached land, the thrusters reignited their engines and completed a synchronized landing on ground pads near the coast of Florida. It’s a signature move by SpaceX, which routinely recovers and reuses its rocket boosters to reduce the cost of launches.
SpaceX did not attempt to recover the center booster due to fuel requirements.
The company has yet to successfully retrieve all three reinforcements, although it has come close. The two side thrusters made a timely, synchronized landing on the ground pads after an April 2019 mission, and the rocket’s center thruster landed on a marine platform. But the strong waves overturned him.
For years, the Falcon Heavy was the most powerful operational rocket in the world. But in November, NASA’s new moon rocket, called the Space Launch System, or SLS, stole that title with its maiden launch. SLS launched the unmanned Artemis 1 mission around the Moon, paving the way for future missions with astronauts on board.
While the Falcon Heavy puts out about 5 million pounds of thrust, the SLS puts out up to 8.8 million pounds of thrust, 15 percent more than the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo landings the
At its experimental facility in South Texas, SpaceX is in the final stages of preparation for the first orbital launch attempt of its Super Heavy spacecraft and rocket. Although the test flight still awaits final approval from federal regulators, it could take off in the coming weeks.
If successful, SpaceX’s spacecraft would dethrone the SLS as the most powerful rocket flying today.
The Starship system is expected to outperform both SLS and Falcon Heavy. The upcoming Super Heavy booster, which is designed to launch the Starship spacecraft into space, is expected to put down about 17 million pounds of thrust.
It’s not all competition, though. Both the SLS rocket and SpaceX’s spacecraft are part of NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon for the first time in half a century.
SpaceX has its own ambitious vision for the spacecraft: to transport humans and cargo to Mars with the hope of one day establishing a permanent human settlement there.