A brilliant red color Tesla Roadster owned by Elon Musk is all steady to be fired into space on SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket. The private space company headed by Tesla CEO, Musk, is in all hopes to launch the most powerful operational rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space center on Tuesday.
The Falcon Heavy Rocket, as the name says itself, is a heavy lift version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket. Three Falcon 9 cores are strapped together to give the rocket an astounding amount of power. Since each Falcon 9 has nine main rocket engines, there is a total of 27 engines that will be used to send the vehicle to space which is unique as no other rocket has ever used so many. Supposedly Falcon heavy can create more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which makes it capable of putting around 140,000 pounds of cargo into lower Earth orbit, making it the most powerful rocket in the world.
As reports say that in its demonstration mission the Tesla Roadster will be sent on an elliptical orbit around the Sun known as a Hohmann transfer orbit, and at one stage, it will closely pass by Mars.
Getting the car into space is a difficult and complicated process. It is said that Falcon Heavy will launch with all three cores together, but during the ascent, the outer two cores will break and land back on Earth. Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy is partially reusable so the cores, once they detach, will land back on Earth. The pair is to head back to Cape Canaveral and touch Landing Zone 1 and Landing Zone 2 – The two landing pads on the coast. The center core will also return to Earth but will head towards the Atlantic and land on Space X’s autonomous drone ships in the ocean. The outer core of Falcon Heavy has already flown before, one for Thaicom in May 2016 and the other for International Space Station in August 2016. The space company has released an animated video on its official YouTube channel showing the entire journey of Roadster to Mars.
If the launch succeeds, Falcon Heavy will rank the most powerful rocket in operation till today and the most powerful spacecraft to blast off from the United States since NASA’s giant Saturn 5 in 1973.
I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by alien race millions of years in the future. – Elon Musk
The launch is scheduled for liftoff on Tuesday, February 6th during a span of 1:30 PM to 4 PM ET from complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It is the same pad used by Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11’s three crewmen on their historic mission in 1969 which included Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for their first steps in the lunar surface.
