The stakes were high for SpaceX on Tuesday when their triple-core monster rocket leapt off from Florida’s Space Coast on an ambitious shakedown mission that held many unknowns for the California-based company.
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A decade-long journey to the launch pad could end on Tuesday for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket with the long-awaited maiden launch of the tri-core rocket. With a commercial launch license from the FAA in hand, a clean Launch Readiness Review and fair weather forecast, SpaceX wheeled the monster rocket up the ramp to Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center Sunday night and placed it in its vertical launch position for liftoff on Tuesday during a two-and-a-half-hour window opening at 18:30 UTC, 1:30 p.m. local time.
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SpaceX’s tri-core Falcon Heavy rocket breathed fire for the first time on Wednesday atop its Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad, igniting all 27 Merlin engines on the rocket’s business end for a 12-second test firing designed to collect valuable data not only on the behavior of the engines but also the rocket’s structure as a whole.
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Instead of the boilerplate mass simulators flown on test flights of past rockets, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk picked a more colorful payload for Falcon Heavy’s maiden voyage: a cherry-red Tesla Roadster from one of his other entrepreneurial ventures.
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SpaceX rolled the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket up the ramp to Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for the first time on December 28, 2017 for a critical series of fit checks to confirm the tri-core rocket is compatible with its launch pad.
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