The world’s most powerful operational rocket is on the launch pad ahead of a planned liftoff on Tuesday morning (November 1).
spacex rolled his heavy falcon Rocket towards Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday (October 31). If all goes according to plan, the vehicle will lift off on Tuesday (November 1) at 9:41 a.m. EDT (1341 GMT), sending a handful of payloads into the air for the US space force on a mission called USSF-44.
“Falcon Heavy climbing ramp ahead of tomorrow’s scheduled launch of USSF-44 mission; weather 90% favorable for liftoff.” SpaceX said via Twitter (opens in a new tab) on Monday, in a post that shared a photo of the large rocket making the trip to the pad.
related: Why SpaceX hasn’t flown a Falcon Heavy rocket since 2019
Falcon Heavy goes vertical at Launch Complex 39A pic.twitter.com/4rOUg5q2tYNovember 1, 2022
The Falcon Heavy made the trip to the platform broadside. SpaceX lifted the rocket to a vertical position later Monday, after the sun went down, while the company showed in another tweet (opens in a new tab).
The Falcon Heavy consists of three modified, strapped together falcon 9 early stages. A second stage carrying the payload sits atop the center brace.
Like the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy’s first stages are designed to land vertically after liftoff and for future reuse. But on USSF-44, only the two outer boosters will return to Earth in one piece. The core booster will head out to sea, its booster exhausted from the challenging mission, carrying its payloads into a distant geostationary orbit.
USSF-44 will be only the fourth Falcon Heavy mission and the first since June 2019. The rocket has many flights on its manifest; drought is mainly due to customer satellite delivery delays.
This Falcon Heavy has been to Pad 39A before: SpaceX launched the rocket last week to conduct a static firea routine test that briefly fires first-stage engines while a vehicle remains anchored to the ground.
The static fire occurred without USSF-44 payloads on top of the rocket. After the test, SpaceX rolled the rocket back into its hangar to integrate the satellites, about which little is known. (The main payload, a spacecraft called USSF-44, is classified.)
Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 2 a.m. 1, to claim that SpaceX had raised the Falcon Heavy to an upright position on the pad.
Mike Wall is the author of “out there (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; Illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @migueldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @spacedot.com (opens in a new tab) or in Facebook (opens in a new tab).
