Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket on Thursday for Saudi Arabia’s Arabsat, the rocket’s first mission for a paying customer.
Falcon Heavy rumbled aloft at 6.35pm local time from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. SpaceX then recovered all three of the boosters back on Earth, achieving a feat it wasn’t able to pull off in the rocket’s demonstration flight last year. The two side boosters simultaneously returned to land and the centre core touched down on a drone ship hundreds of nautical miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.
“The Falcons have landed,” Musk tweeted. (Watch the launch mission video above.)
SpaceX’s mission was to deploy Arabsat-6A, a high-capacity telecommunications satellite that will deliver television, radio, Internet and mobile communications to customers in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, according to a press kit.
SpaceX set a company record last year with 21 launches for customers. Much of the focus this year is on the first flight with humans on board: SpaceX and Boeing have contracts with Nasa to ferry American astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew programme.
SpaceX completed its Demo-1 flight for the programme in March. The next key steps are an in-flight abort test, followed by the first flight with two astronauts. — Reported by Dana Hull, (c) 2019 Bloomberg LP