Falcon Heavy: A Big Rocket with Big Ambitions

Video from the channel SkyShips en Español about Falcon Heavy, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 28:32. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.

Spanish-language documentary about SpaceX's Falcon Heavy: its origins, the delays in its development, the maiden flight, its architecture and its place in the market against other heavy and super-heavy launchers.

SpaceX was founded in the early 2000s with Mars as a long-term goal, but its first rocket, the Falcon 1, was light. The initial plan for a super-heavy based on a Falcon 5 did not go ahead, and the company turned to the Falcon 9, partly financed by NASA's COTS and CRS programs. The heavy project, costing around $500 million, was funded by the company itself, since NASA was developing its SLS. Musk announced a first flight in 2013, but combining three first stages turned out to be far more complex, and testing of specific systems did not begin until that year. SpaceX secured the lease of the LC-39A pad at the Kennedy Space Center and planned to debut it in 2015, but the loss of the CRS-7 mission in 2015 and the explosion of a Falcon 9 on the ground in 2016, which destroyed the Cape Canaveral pad, pushed it back again. The first test flight took place on 6 February 2018, with a Tesla Roadster and the Starman dummy as payload, sent into an elliptical solar orbit whose aphelion lies beyond that of Mars. The side boosters, already used on 2016 missions, landed almost simultaneously in Florida; the new, reinforced core stage fell into the sea at about 500 km/h next to the floating platform because two of its three landing engines failed to ignite, damaging it.

The rocket combines three Falcon 9 Full Thrust first stages with 27 Merlin 1D engines, producing almost 23,000 kN; only the Soviet N1, with 30, had more engines. The core stage throttles down after liftoff to save fuel and regains thrust after the side boosters separate. The second stage carries a restartable vacuum Merlin of up to 934 kN, and the fairing is 13.2 m tall and 5.2 m in diameter. In its expendable configuration it can carry 63.8 t to low Earth orbit, 26.7 t to geostationary transfer orbit, 16.8 t to Mars and 3.5 t to Pluto; reusable, about 30 t to low Earth orbit and about 8 t to geostationary transfer orbit, for around $90 million versus $150 million expendable. In 2019 it launched Arabsat-6A while recovering all three boosters, and the third flight was part of the Department of Defense certification. The video concludes that its role is that of an exceptional launcher within a family focused on reusability, while SpaceX works on Starship.