The world's most powerful rocket, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, roared into space through clear blue skies in its debut test flight on Tuesday from a Florida launch site where moon missions once began, in another milestone for billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private rocket company. Falcon Heavy is designed to place up to 70 tons into standard low-Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch. Propelled by 27 rocket engines, the Falcon Heavy packs more than 5 million pounds of thrust at launch, roughly three times the force of the Falcon 9 booster rocket that until now has been the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet. SpaceX had previously announced plans to eventually use the Falcon Heavy to launch two paying space tourists on a trip around the moon and back. Musk said on Monday he was now inclined to reserve that mission for development of an even more powerful SpaceX launch system, the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, which he said was proceeding more quickly than expected.

Source: dna February 07, 2018 01:40 UTC