SpaceX’s massive Falcon Heavy rocket first fired up in more than three years.
The Falcon Heavy I got a “static fire” test on Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX announced via Twitter (Opens in a new tab) Thursday evening (October 27).
Static fires, in which a rocket’s first stage engines are ignited briefly while the vehicle remains moored on the ground, are a common pre-launch experience. Completion of the achievement keeps Heavy on track to launch the USSF-44 mission for US Space Force on Tuesday (1 November), SpaceX He said in a tweet Thursday.
Related: SpaceX is preparing for the first Falcon Heavy launch since 2019 (photo)
Steady fire from a full heavy Falcon; Tuesday, November 1, aims to launch the USSF-44 mission from Launch Complex 39A in FloridaOctober 28, 2022
This post did not specify a target launch time for Tuesday, but multiple sources did 9:40 am EST (Opens in a new tab) (1340 GMT) as T-0.
Tuesday’s target is a slight slippage for the USSF-44, which has been eyeing a date “not before” October 31.
The USSF-44 will be the fourth launch overall for the Falcon Heavy and the first since June 2019. The massive rocket will carry two high altitude satellites of the Space Force, which did not reveal much about the payloads or their purposes.
“This launch is the culmination of years of effort by a dedicated team made up of mission-focused people from across the US Space Force and SpaceX,” Brigadier General. General Stephen Purdy, Executive Officer of the Space Force’s Guaranteed Access Program in Space, said in an emailed statement Thursday.
“Falcon Heavy is an important component of our overall lifting capacity, and we are very excited to be ready to take off,” he added.
Thursday was a busy day for SpaceX. In addition to the company’s static Falcon Heavy fire It launched 53 of its Starlink Internet satellites To rotate using one of its workforce Falcon 9 missiles.
The starlink The flight, which also included landing the first stage of a Falcon 9 aboard a ship at sea, took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It was SpaceX’s 49th orbital mission in 2022.
Mike Wall is the author of “Abroad (Opens in a new tab)Book (Great Grand Publishing House, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrials. Follow him on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab) or on Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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