The first Falcon Heavy launch since 2019 took place on November 1 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, amid a still scary cover of fog, providing an added bonus for Halloween revelers the day after the holiday.
The rocket’s side boosters returned for a successful, almost simultaneous landing less than 10 minutes after blastoff. After putting a secret cargo into orbit for the US Space Force, the central core rocket was dumped into the ocean.
At 9:43 a.m. ET (6:43 a.m. PT), the Falcon Heavy mission USSF 44 lifted off from pad 39-A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, carrying the TETRA-1 military micro-satellite prototype and a bigger, as-yet-unconfirmed satellite.
The initial launch date for the mission was 2020, however many delays due to problems with the payload have occurred.
In the wake of Elon Musk’s even larger Starship rocket and its companion Super Heavy booster, which NASA hopes will return astronauts to the moon and which Musk dreams of using to build a society on Mars, SpaceX’s big triple rocket that got off the ground for the first time in 2018 seemed to be forgotten.
However, the Falcon Heavy remains SpaceX’s most powerful vehicle to reach orbit. On 2018, a Tesla was launched in its maiden voyage toward Mars. Two further flights took place, both in 2019.
The Falcon Heavy is basically just three Falcon 9 boosters linked together to provide nine times the normal thrust. A more powerful configuration, such as NASA’s Artemis I Space Launch System or the Starship and Super Heavy, will ultimately exist, but for the time being, this is the most powerful rocket in existence.
According to SpaceX, the recovered solid rocket boosters might be repurposed for another classified mission. Possible as soon as January, however, another Falcon Heavy launch of a commercial satellite is scheduled for as early as December.
