Having successfully landed its reusable Falcon 9 booster for the fifth time on Monday, SpaceX has decided to up the degree of difficulty and will now attempt to land three rockets at the same time as part of its Falcon Heavy project, various media outlets reported on Tuesday.
According to Gizmodo and the Christian Science Monitor, the aerospace firm is seeking permission from the government to use two extra landing pads to prepare for the maneuver, which will attempt to have one large rocket comprised of three individual boosters strapped together land at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida.
“SpaceX expects to fly Falcon Heavy for the first time later this year,” SpaceX told the Orlando Sentinel in a statement, adding that they are “seeking regulatory approval to build two additional landing pads at Cape Canaveral” and that they may “initially… attempt drone ship landings.”
While the three boosters would each land at close to the same time, Musk emphasized on Twitter that they would not be exactly simultaneous: two of the rockets would touch down one right after the other, while the third would arrive after a brief delay, no more than a few minutes later.
Can’t wait to see all three cores of Falcon Heavy come back for landings! First two will be almost simultaneous. https://t.co/ryMiewZM4L
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 18, 2016
Like with the lightweight Falcon 9 rockets, the landing is intended to enable SpaceX to recover, repair and reuse the boosters to help save on the costs of space travel, Popular Science explained. The first launch of the Falcon Heavy is currently scheduled for November, and if successful, the heavy-duty rocket could be used to carry crew and supplies to Mars, the website added.
Falcon Heavy landing would be preceded by first Falcon 9 re-launch
Early Monday morning, SpaceX was able to land its reusable, two-stage Falcon 9 rocket for the fifth time, as it softly returned to a site a few miles south of its Cape Canaveral-based launch pad after propelling a Dragon capsule filled with supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Hawthorne, California-based aerospace firm initially completed the maneuver successfully in December 2015, then followed that with three landings involving its floating drone platform earlier this year (once in April and twice in May). Following Monday’s landing, Musk said that the rocket passed post-landing inspection, was in good shape and was ready to fly again.
While SpaceX seems to have the landing thing down pretty well, they have yet to actually reuse one of their Falcon 9 boosters – although, as Business Insider reported earlier this week, they did select the rocket which will be used to make that first attempt, which could take place as early as September. That launch will involve the rocket used for the April landing, as Musk explained he wants to preserve the one from the first landing as a monument.
“Getting to the point where they are not only recovering them intact, but reusing them and, here is the key point, reusing them on launches where there is a customer paying for that launch, that is the hard part,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the Christian Science Monitor.
“It is the reuse that still remains to be proven. The landing of the stages they seem to have got down now, not 100 percent but they have basically got that sorted. So doing that for three stages at once is an operational challenge, but it is not a fundamental challenge. I see no reason why they can’t do this, and it is going to be spectacular,” he added.
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Image credit: SpaceX
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