Musk told reporters on Tuesday that he hopes the launch will cause these companies, as well as national space programs, to up their game.
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So what could possibly be wrong with this groundbreaking test flight?
Musk announced a year ago that he wanted the dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy’s first test flight to be his own cherry red roadster. “I think the smaller satellites are a way of adding resiliency by providing similar but not the entirely exact same capabilities to complement larger satellites, not to replace them”. “When I see the rocket lift off, I see, like, 1,000 things that could not work and it’s wonderful when they do”.
In the months before Falcon Heavy’s launch, Musk and SpaceX posted several carefully arranged photos of the Roadster to imply that the auto – and Tesla by extension – were symbols of human ambition and technological progress.
Nevertheless, even Musk said in the press conference that the company didn’t test Tesla roadster’s materials for durability in space. “It can do anything you want”.
This launch could be seen as a first step for Elon Musk to send people to Mars. The current fuel for Falcon Heavy is RP-1 (a refined kerosene) and liquid oxygen, which creates a lot of carbon dioxide when burnt.
In the meantime, with the Heavy demo out of the way, Musk said SpaceX is putting its commercial crew effort for NASA front and center.
Falcon Heavy is the newest in a lineup of rockets from Space X, a private company aiming to colonize Mars. William Carroll, Indiana University chemist said that the vehicle is likely not going to survive its first year in space, according to a report in LiveScience.
Musk plans to begin recovering more hardware on the rocket, including the payload fairings that make up the nose cone, which would save even more money.
Such performance is slightly more than double that of the world’s next most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy – but at one third of the cost, says Mr Musk.
So we wondered, if we were somehow able to bring the vehicle back from space, would it still work?
Musk first promised that a demonstration flight of the massive rocket would occur in 2012, but the company, whose full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., found that development of the 27-engine behemoth was more hard than initially expected.
Due to specialized training of Air Force pararescuemen and the Wing’s geographic location, the 920th RQW served as the primary rescue force for the astronauts on human spaceflight missions aboard the Shuttle, and will serve as the primary rescue force for the launch of the upcoming manned space platforms. Last December there was a different SpaceX launch in California that was also viewable across the Borderland.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who owns a rocket company called Blue Origin, wrote: “Woohoo!”
This recovery massively reduces the launch cost for both exploration and scientific discovery.
“I’m guessing our total investment is over half a billion”, Musk said. As an example of his eccentricity, he once sent a wheel of Le Brouere cheese into space during the maiden flight of SpaceX’s first Dragon capsule.
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That rocket is now being used to bring satellites into orbit and resupply the International Space Station.
