Elon Musk is getting ready to launch his own shiny red sports car to Mars orbit. On Tuesday afternoon, SpaceX is set to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time, from a pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The rocket – the biggest and most powerful system SpaceX has ever built – will carry Musk's red 2008 Tesla Roadster.
The colourful stunt is meant
to demonstrate how the company might someday help deliver people and other
payloads into space. "Red car for a red planet," Musk said on Twitter
in early December.
Musk has repeatedly warned
that there's a good chance Falcon Heavy could burst into flames before it
reaches its destination. If this carefully coordinated space "ballet"
works, however, Musk's old car will be running laps between the Sun and Mars in
what's called a hyperbolic orbit.
"The payload will be …
playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit," Musk said in
December. On Monday, he even posted a photo of the car with a dummy driver Musk
referred to as "Starman". SpaceX's Falcon Heavy system could one day
ferry a payload of 37,000 pounds – roughly 14 Tesla Roadsters' worth of mass –
to Mars.
That will come in handy if
Musk ever manages to send humans to colonise the red planet. The key difference
between the Falcon Heavy and other rocket systems is two-fold: it's both bigger
and cheaper. The 230-foot-tall (70-metre-tall) Falcon Heavy system relies on
three reusable boosters, which are each made of nine cone-shaped engines.
Unlike most booster systems, these rocket-pushers are not for one-time use.
When successful, the
boosters push their payload into the sky, then detach, land themselves, and get
refurbished for re-use. After a single use, boosters from other traditional
systems generally fall into the ocean, burn up in the atmosphere, or get dumped
on the ground.
SpaceX first successfully
tested the new recycling system in March of 2017 with its Falcon 9 rocket.
Those same reusable cores make the price of a Falcon Heavy launch just US$90
million,about a third of the cost of the competition.
The other perk of the new
system, of course, is its power. The only rocket that was ever able to carry
more stuff into space than Falcon Heavy was the Saturn V rocket, which was
developed and used by NASA for its Apollo moon missions in the 1960s and 70s.
According to SpaceX, the
Falcon Heavy rocket is capable of carrying roughly 2.6 times as much stuff as the
US space shuttle program did.
Last week, SpaceX fired up
Falcon Heavy on the launchpad, the first sign that the company was nearly ready
for this week's historic event. But the SpaceX boss knows the coming launch is
no sure bet. Musk tweeted "Destination is Mars orbit. Will be in deep
space for a billion years or so if it doesn't blow up on ascent."
Other space moguls are
rooting for a successful launch for Musk. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who's heading
up his own privately-funded space company, sent Musk a well-wishing tweet on
Monday. Musk chimed back just hours later with his own kissy face for the Blue
Origin boss. Those who want to watch the drama unfold can tune in to the
livestream of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch on Tuesday afternoon.
The launch is scheduled to
occur between 1:30 and 4:30 pm ET, though there is always a chance of delays. The
Falcon Heavy launch is "guaranteed to be exciting, one way or
another," Musk quipped in a December tweet.
Via Bussinessinsider