You can watch the action live as SpaceX’s powerful Falcon Heavy rocket launches for the sixth time ever on Thursday (April 27).
At 7:29 p.m. EDT (2329 GMT), the Falcon Heavy, carrying two satellites toward a far-off geostationary orbit, is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The essential payload on the present mission is ViaSat-3 Americas, a 14,000-pound (6,400 kilograms) broadband satellite that will be worked by California-based organization Viasat.
Arcturus, a communications satellite that will be managed by San Francisco-based Astranis Space Technologies, is the second satellite currently in flight.
“Although it only weighs 300 kg [660 pounds], the mighty communications satellite has the ability to provide data throughput up to 7.5 Gbps for … Alaska and the surrounding region,” EverydayAstronaut.com wrote of Arcturus in a description of today’s flight.
The three strapped-together first stages of SpaceX’s reliable Falcon 9 rocket make up the Falcon Heavy. The payloads and an upper stage top off the central booster.
Bird of prey Weighty appeared in February 2018 with a significant practice run flight that sent SpaceX pioneer and President Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster into space around the sun with Starman, a spacesuit-clad life sized model, in the driver’s seat.
Since then, the bulky rocket has been in the air four more times. In January of this year, it launched the classified USSF-67 mission for the United States Space Force.
The three first-stage boosters of the Falcon Heavy are made to be used again. In any case, the sponsors won’t generally be recuperated on the present mission, probably in light of the fact that they will not have sufficient fuel left over to move themselves securely back to Earth for an upward score.
The Falcon Heavy was SpaceX’s most powerful rocket for more than five years. However, the company’s enormous Starship vehicle won that title on April 20 with its first liftoff, a test flight that reached a maximum altitude of 24 miles (39 kilometers) and ended in a controlled explosion high above the Gulf of Mexico for safety reasons.
According to SpaceX, the 33 first-stage Raptor engines on the Starship generate 16.7 million pounds of thrust during liftoff. That is nearly twice as much as the Space Launch System megarocket, which comes in second place, and more than three times as much as the Falcon Heavy does.