Falcon Heavy: Redefining Spaceflight
The Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable heavy launch vehicle developed by the American aerospace company SpaceX. Falcon Heavy has 2 stages, the first of which is recoverable. A short 🧵
The Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable heavy launch vehicle developed by the American aerospace company SpaceX. Falcon Heavy has 2 stages, the first of which is recoverable. A short 🧵
The Falcon Heavy’s first stage is made up of 3 Falcon boosters. Each of these boosters have 9 Merlin 1D engines, putting the Heavy under the power of 27 engines at launch. Falcon Heavy is pushed to space under 5 million pounds of thrust, making it close to the Space Shuttle.
The side boosters are usually recovered by landing on pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Shortly after booster separation, the boosters start a boost back burn to set it back on course for landing at Cape Canaveral. Recovering the boosters lowers the cost of launches.
On launches where all of the power and fuel is needed to deliver the satellite, the boosters are expended and dropped into the ocean. As of the writing of this thread, only Viasat-3 and Europa Clipper have had the side boosters expended. Expendable launches cost $150M.
Only for the first 3 launches there were attempts to recover the core stage. Only 1 of these recovery attempts was successful. Unlike the side boosters, the core stage lands on a droneship. Expending the core stage increases performance of the rocket.
Not only are the side boosters recovered, but so are the fairings. The fairings are recovered after a fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. In the early attempts of fairing recovery by catching them with a large net on a boat, not many of the attempts were successful.
Plans for a Falcon Heavy rocket date back to 2003, with the earliest version being three Falcon 1 cores stuck together. In 2005, SpaceX proposed the Falcon 9 Heavy, which was three Falcon 9 cores stuck together. The original flight was scheduled for 2013, from Vandenberg AFB.
After numerous delays and changes, Falcon Heavy’s first launch was scheduled for early 2018, but this time from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. In the end, FH launched on its maiden flight on February 6, 2018. The payload was Elon Musk’s own Tesla Roadster.
Falcon Heavy had its next launch a year later, being the Arabsat-6A mission. This was the first time that all three cores landed, and the only time that would happen. The core booster survived a tough and hot re-entry, and successfully made it for landing on OCISLY.
Falcon Heavy had its next flight a few months later, in June 2019. It launched the COSMIC-2 mission for NOAA, and a few Department of Defense payloads. This certified the Falcon Heavy for NSSL payloads. The mission was very complicated, since it required four second stage burns.
For 3 years, there was a drought of FH launches. On November 1, 2022, Falcon Heavy launched the USSF-44 mission which marked the first flight in 3 years, and the first NSSL launch of the Falcon Heavy. FH would go on to have two more NSSL launches in 2023, being USSF-67 and 52.
Ever since then, Falcon Heavy has also launched many satellites and probes such as Jupiter-3 (the heaviest commercial satellite), NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe, Boeing’s X-37B spaceplane on the USSF-52 mission, NOAA’s GOES-U satellite, and NASA’s Europa Clipper.
Falcon Heavy revolutionized spaceflight, offering very heavy performance capabilities at low costs. In the far future, FH and F9 will be known as the stepping stones to reusability and access to space for everybody. 🚀
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