“Space, particularly when you explore or do something new, it forces you literally and metaphorically to look up from your device.” “You see this so often with space, even with the exploratory missions to Mars and Pluto, people feel almost an antidote to the everyday world of social media we persist in, which is so inward-looking and self-referential,” he said. How on earth do you do that? It was spectacular,” he said.Ĭasey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, told the Guardian that the excitement of the launch and success of the first stage of the mission would reignite interest in spaceflight. “It’s incredible that not only did he get that rocket up there, but then he lands those two pieces right back on the ground upright, right on the circle. Her husband declared Elon Musk to be “brilliant”. “We couldn’t just see it, we could hear it and feel it vibrating the ground. “It was overwhelming, better than expected, unbelievable,” Mrs Salkeld said. Parents kept children out of school, and other families travelled great distances to witness the launch.Ĭindy and Patrick Salkeld came from California to watch. Spectators who paid $195 each for a ticket packed the bleachers at the Saturn V visitor centre and had a clear view of the launchpad across the Banana river just 3.9 miles away. There had been a carnival atmosphere at the Kennedy Space Centre through the day, with Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, 88, the second man to walk on the moon after Neil Armstrong, as a guest of honour. Meanwhile, the two side boosters had landed successfully on land at the space centre, marking the 42nd and 43rd time SpaceX had retrieved a booster for reuse. An hour after the launch, SpaceX was unable to confirm that the booster had landed safely on a recovery barge in the Atlantic Ocean. The only possible downer on the day for Musk was the rumoured loss of Falcon heavy’s third booster, the central core. Spectators at Cocoa Beach near Cape Canaveral watch the rocket launch. Crazy at it sounds, that’s how the rocket business works.” “It’s like where one aircraft company has reusable aircraft and all the other aircraft companies had aircraft that were single use, and you’d sort of parachute out at your destination and the plane would crash land somewhere. “If we are successful, it’s game over for other operators of heavy-lift rockets,” Musk said. The Falcon, Musk added, also possessed almost twice the payload capacity of the Delta. Recycling rockets, Musk said, keeps the cost of a Falcon heavy launch at about $90m, compared with $435m for the launch of a Delta IV Heavy operated by the United Launch Alliance. On Monday, he had estimated Falcon’s chances at about 50-50, and said he feared a launchpad-destroying explosion similar to the Falcon 9 fireball that created extensive damage in September 2016.īut in the same conference call with reporters, Musk said that a problem-free launch of Falcon Heavy would be a game-changer for SpaceX and other commercial spaceflight companies vying for contracts from Nasa, the US military and private enterprise. Musk, the billionaire founder and lead designer of SpaceX, who first announced plans for a heavy-lift rocket in 2011 and constructed the Falcon Heavy by strapping together three boosters from the company’s smaller but proven Falcon 9 cargo rockets, had downplayed expectations of a successful launch. “Falcon Heavy heading to space on our test flight, building on the history of Saturn V/Apollo and returning launchpad 39A to interplanetary missions,” a SpaceX announcer said as the rocket lifted off, referring to the historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Centre from which the first manned moon mission took flight in July 1969. Musk hopes the Falcon Heavy will help with interplanetary exploration and assist the mission of Nasa, the American space agency, as it works towards a return to the moon for the first time since 1972, and eventually landing humans on Mars before the middle of the century.

From there, it will journey on through a six-month, 400m-kilometre trip to a solar orbit, for more than a billion years. Pictures of the car heading into space with the Earth below gave the triumphant launch a surreal quality. 00:32 Timelapse of Elon Musk's dummy astronaut orbiting Earth in a Tesla – video

Flacon heavy launch