Falcon Heavy
Falcon Heavy is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle with partial reusability that can carry cargo into Earth orbit and beyond. It is designed, manufactured and launched by American aerospace company SpaceX.
The rocket consists of a center core on which two Falcon 9 boosters are attached, and a second stage on top of the center core. Falcon Heavy has the second highest payload capacity of any currently operational launch vehicle behind NASA's Space Launch System, and the fourth-highest capacity of any rocket to reach orbit, trailing behind the SLS, Energia and the Saturn V.
SpaceX conducted Falcon Heavy's maiden launch on February 6, 2018, at 20:45 UTC. As a dummy payload, the rocket carried a Tesla Roadster belonging to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, with a mannequin dubbed "Starman" in the driver's seat. The second Falcon Heavy launch occurred on April 11, 2019, and all three booster rockets successfully returned to Earth. The third Falcon Heavy launch successfully occurred on June 25, 2019. Since then, Falcon Heavy has been certified for the National Security Space Launch program.
Falcon Heavy was designed to be able to carry humans into space beyond low Earth orbit, although as of 2018, SpaceX does not intend to transport people on Falcon Heavy, nor pursue the human-rating certification process to transport NASA astronauts. Both Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 are expected to eventually be superseded by the Starship super-heavy lift launch vehicle, currently being developed.
History
Concepts for a Falcon Heavy launch vehicle using three Falcon 1 core boosters, with an approximate payload-to-LEO capacity of two tons, were initially discussed as early as 2003. The concept for three core booster stages of the company's then as-yet-unflown Falcon 9 was referred to in 2005 as the Falcon 9 Heavy.SpaceX unveiled the plan for the Falcon Heavy to the public at a Washington, D.C., news conference in April 2011, with an initial test flight expected in 2013.
A number of factors delayed the planned maiden flight to 2018, including two anomalies with Falcon 9 launch vehicles, which required all engineering resources to be dedicated to failure analysis, halting flight operations for many months. The integration and structural challenges of combining three Falcon 9 cores were more difficult than expected.
In July 2017, Elon Musk said, "It actually ended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought.... We were pretty naive about that".
The initial test flight for the first Falcon Heavy lifted off on February 6, 2018, at 20:45 UTC, carrying its dummy payload, Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster, beyond Mars orbit.
Conception and funding
Musk first mentioned Falcon Heavy in a September 2005 news update, referring to a customer request from 18 months prior. Various solutions using the planned Falcon 5 had been explored, but the only cost-effective, reliable iteration was one that used a 9-engine first stage—the Falcon 9. The Falcon Heavy was developed using private capital with Musk stating that the cost was more than US$500 million. No government financing was provided for its development.Design and development
The Falcon Heavy design is based on Falcon 9's fuselage and engines. By 2008, SpaceX had been aiming for the first launch of Falcon 9 in 2009, while "Falcon 9 Heavy would be in a couple of years". Speaking at the 2008 Mars Society Conference, Musk also indicated that he expected a hydrogen-fueled upper stage would follow two to three years later.By April 2011, the capabilities and performance of the Falcon 9 vehicle were better understood, SpaceX having completed two successful demonstration missions to low Earth orbit, one of which included reignition of the second-stage engine. At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2011, Musk stated that Falcon Heavy would "carry more payload to orbit or escape velocity than any vehicle in history, apart from the Saturn V Moon rocket... and Soviet Energia rocket". In the same year, with the expected increase in demand for both variants, SpaceX announced plans to expand manufacturing capacity "as we build towards the capability of producing a Falcon 9 first stage or Falcon Heavy side booster every week and an upper stage every two weeks".
In 2015, SpaceX announced a number of changes to the Falcon Heavy rocket, worked in parallel to the upgrade of the Falcon 9 v1.1 launch vehicle. In December 2016, SpaceX released a photo showing the Falcon Heavy interstage at the company headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Testing
By May 2013, a new, partly underground test stand was being built at the SpaceX Rocket Development and Test Facility in McGregor, Texas, specifically to test the triple cores and twenty-seven rocket engines of the Falcon Heavy. By May 2017, SpaceX conducted the first static fire test of flight-design Falcon Heavy center core at the McGregor facility.In July 2017, Musk discussed publicly the challenges of testing a complex launch vehicle like the three-core Falcon Heavy, indicating that a large extent of the new design "is really impossible to test on the ground" and could not be effectively tested independent of actual flight tests.
By September 2017, all three first stage cores had completed their static fire tests on the ground test stand. The first Falcon Heavy static fire test was conducted on January 24, 2018.
Maiden flight
In April 2011, Musk was planning for a first launch of Falcon Heavy from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on the United States west coast in 2013. SpaceX refurbished Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg AFB to accommodate Falcon 9 and Heavy. The first launch from the Cape Canaveral, Florida east coast launch complex was planned for late 2013 or 2014.Due partly to the failure of SpaceX CRS-7 in June 2015, SpaceX rescheduled the maiden Falcon Heavy flight in September 2015 to occur no earlier than April 2016. The flight was to be launched from the refurbished Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A. The flight was postponed again to late 2016, early 2017, summer 2017, late 2017 and finally to February 2018.
At a July 2017 meeting of the International Space Station Research and Development meeting in Washington, D.C., Musk downplayed expectations for the success of the maiden flight:
There's a real good chance the vehicle won't make it to orbit... I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest.
In December 2017, Musk tweeted that the dummy payload on the maiden Falcon Heavy launch would be his personal Tesla Roadster playing David Bowie's "Space Oddity", and that it would be launched into an orbit around the Sun that will reach the orbit of Mars. He released pictures in the following days. The car had three cameras attached to provide "epic views".
On December 28, 2017, the Falcon Heavy was moved to the launch pad in preparation of a static fire test of all 27 engines, which was expected on January 19, 2018. However, due to the U.S. government partial shutdown that began on January 20, 2018, the testing and launch were further delayed. The static fire test was conducted on January 24, 2018. Musk confirmed via Twitter that the test "was good" and later announced the rocket would be launched on February 6, 2018.
On February 6, 2018, after a delay of over two hours due to high winds, Falcon Heavy lifted off at 20:45 UTC. Its side boosters landed safely on Landing Zones 1 and 2 a few minutes later. However, only one of the three engines on the center booster that were intended to restart ignited during descent, causing the booster to be destroyed upon impacting the ocean at a speed of over.
Initially, Elon Musk tweeted that the Roadster had overshot its planned heliocentric orbit, and would reach the asteroid belt. Later, observations by telescopes showed that the Roadster would only slightly exceed the orbit of Mars at aphelion.
Later flights
A year after the successful demo flight, SpaceX had signed five commercial contracts worth US$500–750 million, meaning that it had managed to cover the development cost of the rocket. The second flight, and first commercial one, occurred on April 11, 2019, launching Arabsat-6A, with all three boosters landing successfully for the first time.The third flight occurred on June 25, 2019, launching the STP-2 payload. The payload was composed of 25 small spacecraft. Operational Geostationary transfer orbit missions for Intelsat and Inmarsat, which were planned for late 2017, were moved to the Falcon 9 Full Thrust rocket version as it had become powerful enough to lift those heavy payloads in its expendable configuration. In June 2022, the U.S. Space Force certified Falcon Heavy for launching its top secret satellites, with the first such launch being USSF-44 which happened at November 1, 2022; and the second of which being USSF-67, which was launched 11 weeks after USSF-44. ViaSat selected the Falcon Heavy in late 2018 for the launch of its ViaSat-3 satellite which was scheduled to launch in the 2020–2022 timeframe; however it would not launch until May 1, 2023. On October 13, 2023, Falcon Heavy embarked on its 8th flight carrying NASA's Psyche probe to the asteroid 16 Psyche. This mission only had the side boosters return to Earth with the center core expended, a decision made to create more tolerable margins for the mission.
Following the announcement of NASA's Artemis program of returning humans to the Moon, the Falcon Heavy rocket has been mentioned several times as an alternative to the expensive Space Launch System program, but NASA decided to exclusively use SLS to launch the Orion capsule. However, Falcon Heavy will support commercial missions for the Artemis program, since it will be used to transport the Dragon XL spacecraft to the Lunar Gateway. It was also selected to launch the first two elements of the Lunar Gateway, the Power and Propulsion Element, and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, on a single launch no earlier than 2025, and to launch Astrobotic Technology's Griffin lander as part of the Artemis Program's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. On October 14, 2024, Falcon Heavy transported NASA's Europa Clipper into space to explore Jupiter's moon Europa.