SpaceX released a short video on their Twitter Account on April 6, showing the assemblage of the three first-stage boosters that composes the most powerful rocket flying today, Falcon Heavy. The video was took in the Launch Complex 39A hangar, at the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
The most powerful rocket to exist today
The standard static fire test took place on Friday (April, 5), to check if Falcon Heavy’s engines are properly working. The company also tweeted a photo of the assembled rocket and its 27 first-stage Merlin engines which is said that it generates more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.
The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, an uncrewed test trip that launched the company’s Crew Dragon is also visible in the photo and it was indicated in another tweet. Demo-1, the mission that powered the Crew Dragon into space has failed six days after its launching (March 2), as the capsule fell down in the Atlantic Ocean. However, the company came up with a new plan of launching astronauts with the Crew Dragon as early as this summer.
The first-stage of Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket existing today, comprises three of Falcon 9’s first stages modified and fixed together. An important note is that the Heavy rocket is designed to be reusable, like the Falcon 9 one.
The rocket has one successful mission that is proud of, a flight test that took place in February 2018, and which boosted a red Tesla Roadster of SpaceX founder and owner Elon Musk on an orbit around the sun.
However, unlike the Demo-1 launching, Tuesday’s mission is an operational one: the rocket will propulse into space, for the Saudi Arabian company Arasbat, its communication satellite which weights 6,000 kilograms and is named after the company.
Finally, a relevant reminder would be that in February 2018, during the flight test, the central core tried to land on one of SpaceX robotic drone placed in the Atlantic Ocean but failed a little bit short and ended up with two of the rockets’ first-stages boosters making a precise landing near KSC, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
