The Tesla Roadster Now Floating Through Space Is Space Exploration's Latest Milestone

While the capital markets play their numbers game, SpaceX has moved a little closer to Mars

A red Tesla Roadster, with someone in the driver's seat, posture relaxed, right hand on the wheel, left arm resting on the window ledge. The scene looks ordinary. It is not: the car and this "person" are racing away from Earth, bound for an orbit around the sun.

The car belongs to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The figure in the seat is not a person but a test dummy in a spacesuit. It went up aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket at 4:45 a.m. Beijing time on February 7, from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Twenty-eight minutes in, the upper stage shut down for the second time and the car settled into an Earth orbit with an apogee of 7,000 kilometers. After crossing the Van Allen radiation belts and coasting in that parking orbit for six hours, the upper-stage engine lit again at 11:50 a.m. Beijing time and sent Musk's Roadster into an orbit around the sun, its far point in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

With this launch, the Falcon Heavy became the most powerful rocket in service. It can put 63.8 tons into low Earth orbit (LEO) — the weight of a Boeing 737-600 full of passengers and fuel; 26.7 tons into geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO); and 16.8 tons on a single trip to Mars.

More important, the Falcon Heavy is built to be recovered and flown again. Both side boosters and the first stage can fly themselves back to Earth, and the payload fairing carries parachutes so that it, too, can be retrieved. The two side boosters on this maiden flight were in fact secondhand — both had flown before as Falcon 9 first stages. Because of that reusable design, a Falcon Heavy launch costs $90 million, a quarter of the $400 million charged for United Launch Alliance's comparable Delta IV Heavy.

And the Falcon Heavy was designed, built and launched by SpaceX, a private company that pays its own way.

Full launch video recap

A rocky road to the first launch, but it met its main goals

The Falcon Heavy was assembled and standing on the pad at the Kennedy Space Center as early as December 28, 2017. Musk announced that the payload for this test flight would be his own Tesla Roadster.

The test had originally been set for the second half of 2016, but slipped after the CRS-7 mission failed in June 2016 and the rocket blew up in mid-air. SpaceX is a small company with a limited engineering staff, and the post-mortem review of that failure and the changes that followed ate into the Falcon Heavy, which was being developed alongside the Falcon 9. The mission kept sliding, from early 2017 all the way to February 2018.

On January 24, the Falcon Heavy completed a static fire test on the pad: all 27 engines lit to simulate the conditions of a real launch while the rocket stayed bolted down. SpaceX had rarely run this kind of test before. The Falcon Heavy's 27 engines make it too big to test as a whole on the ground, so the static fire had to happen on the launch pad itself.

Early yesterday morning, the launch, set for 2 a.m., was pushed back: the local weather shifted, and high-altitude wind shear appeared that could have doomed the flight.

Two hours late, at 4:45 a.m. Beijing time, the Falcon Heavy lit its engines and lifted off.

• At T+1:06, the rocket passed 1,200 km/h and hit maximum dynamic pressure (Max-Q), meaning it had cleared the hardest test of its structural strength. It then went supersonic.
• At T+2:29, the two side boosters shut down their engines; at T+2:33, mechanical pushers and nitrogen thrusters separated them cleanly from the core stage.
• At T+2:50, the two boosters finished turning around and relit some of their engines, beginning reentry, aimed at the landing zone on the ground beside the launch pad.
• At T+3:07, the core stage separated and the second stage lit.
• At T+3:24, the core stage finished turning around and relit some of its engines, beginning reentry, aimed at the droneship Of Course I Still Love You, waiting in the Atlantic.
• At T+3:49, the fairing separated. The camera showed the spacesuited dummy still sitting in the Tesla Roadster, and as the two were exposed to vacuum, David Bowie's "Space Oddity" came up as background music. The $5 million fairing would later fall back to Earth to be recovered.
• At T+6:41, the boosters relit their engines for landing; at T+8:06, both touched down successfully, almost in unison.
• At T+6:47, the core stage relit its engines for landing, but it had run out of fuel and only one of the three engines meant to fire actually did. At T+8:40, the camera feed from Of Course I Still Love You cut out; the last frame was a cloud of white mist. At the press conference afterward, Musk confirmed that the core-stage landing had failed.
• At T+8:31, the second stage shut down for the first time.
• At T+28:22, the second stage relit, then shut down again at T+28:52, leaving the Roadster in a parking orbit with an apogee of 7,000 kilometers.
• At T+7 hours 1 minute, the second stage fired a third time and sent the Roadster into orbit around the sun. For as far ahead as anyone can see, the car will cross the orbit of Mars and travel out as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Saturn.

Through the whole flight, the cameras on board recorded pictures no one had ever seen: against the blue of Earth, a red sports car with a spacesuited figure at the wheel, apparently listening to a David Bowie song.

As Musk put it himself, it was "an epic sight."

SpaceX hid several Easter eggs in the Roadster. On the center console sits a tiny model of the Roadster, with a tiny figure sitting inside it. The center screen reads "DON'T PANIC," the famous line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A circuit board in the car reads "Made on Earth by humans." And the car carries a miniaturized copy of Foundation, Isaac Asimov's celebrated science fiction series.

The Falcon Heavy is not only the most powerful rocket humans can launch right now. It is probably also the greatest thing nerds and science fiction fans have to pin their hopes on.

The Falcon Heavy's design is so complicated that even Musk wasn't sure of it

Elon Musk began sketching out the Falcon Heavy in 2005 and announced it officially in 2011. At that point SpaceX had launched two Falcon 9s successfully and had not yet begun testing rocket recovery. A few Falcon 9 launch failures, plus the sheer difficulty of the engineering, pushed the Falcon Heavy's first flight back by five years.

Put simply, the Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9s strapped together.

The Falcon 9 takes its name from the nine Merlin 1D liquid-oxygen/kerosene engines on its first stage. That many-engine layout exists to simplify production and hold down development costs. If cost is no object — the Delta IV, built by United Launch Alliance on NASA's money, for example — the first stage can use a single RS-68 engine instead, which is very powerful and very expensive.

Since the Falcon Heavy binds together the core stages of three Falcon 9s, its first stage has 27 engines firing at once. The two on the outside are called boosters and the one in the middle the core stage, but the hardware of all three is the same. This layout is very rare: ordinary rocket design cuts the number of parts as far as possible, so as to cut the odds of something breaking.

Beyond those odds, a many-engine design brings the problem of "coupled resonance": the vibrations of 27 engines running together can compound with the vibrations of the rocket body, damaging the structure and killing the mission.

Last July, Musk said the Falcon Heavy might well blow up on its first launch. He added that he hoped any explosion would come far enough from the pad to leave the launch facility intact — that alone, he said, could count as a kind of success.

Five years late, SpaceX kept the design anyway, and for one reason: cost.

In this morning's launch, both Falcon Heavy side boosters were secondhand rockets, flown before: one had launched the Thaicom 8 satellite as a Falcon 9 in May 2016, the other the CRS-9 resupply run to the International Space Station as a Falcon 9 in July 2016. Recovered from those flights and inspected, the two were fitted with a small nose cone on top and became today's side boosters.

At the press conference after the successful mission, Elon Musk confirmed that both recovered rockets were in excellent shape and could fly again.

The Falcon Heavy's core stage was brand new, flying for the first time. It was supposed to be recovered too, and that attempt failed. At the post-launch press conference, Musk confirmed that the stage did get close to the droneship in the Atlantic, but it had run out of fuel and only one of the three engines meant to fire for braking worked. It hit the water at 300 km/h about 100 meters from the ship, and most likely shattered.

Losing the core stage counts as no more than a small setback for the mission. Unlike past Falcon 9 commercial launches, which had a customer paying the bill, this Falcon Heavy flight was pure spending: to prove the design works, to advertise to future customers, and, along the way, to satisfy a bit of Musk's adolescent fantasy. Measured against the mission's stated goal — a test — there was no way for this launch to be a "failure."

On future commercial Falcon Heavy flights, recovering all three first stages caps the payload to geosynchronous orbit at 8 tons. Recovering only the side boosters, so the core stage need not save fuel, raises it to 16 tons. The two versions will carry different prices, and missions flown on secondhand rockets will cost less.

SpaceX is about to take more business from Boeing and other giants

Next to the government-led rockets now in development in the US, SpaceX's look almost "budget." The core stage of NASA's next-generation rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), uses four RS-25 hydrogen-oxygen engines left over from the Space Shuttle program — engines that, measured by vacuum thrust, are more than twice as powerful as the Merlin 1Ds on the Falcon Heavy.

The SLS is in another class on payload as well: its most powerful version can put 130 tons into low Earth orbit, more than double what the Falcon Heavy can lift. And the Falcon Heavy, limited by the diameter of its core stage, has little room left to grow.

The SLS is due to fly for the first time in 2019, at $500 million to $1 billion a launch. Whenever the US sends up a bigger, heavier deep-space probe, or returns to the moon, it will depend on the government-led SLS.

The rest of the market looks less comfortable.

The US completed 29 commercial launches in 2017. SpaceX flew 16 of them, more than half. They included satellites for commercial companies, such as Iridium's communications satellites; NASA work, such as cargo resupply runs to the International Space Station; and classified military missions, such as the top-secret X-37B spaceplane.

In other words, in small and medium-sized launches, SpaceX has already won the market on low prices and near-100% reliability.

Put the other way around, those markets are the only ones where SpaceX can make a mark. On the big government-led programs that value reliability over economy — going to the moon, going to Mars — SpaceX probably has little part to play.

SpaceX's next goal is to go to Mars itself.

After the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX is building two things: a more powerful hydrogen-oxygen rocket engine called Raptor, and a "Big Fucking Rocket" built around that engine. On the back of those two, SpaceX plans to put people on Mars sometime after 2025, at a one-way cost per person that could fall below $1 million. In NASA's plans, that figure is $10 billion.

For a private company set on sending people to Mars, SpaceX is still small. In 2017 it raised $350 million at a valuation of $21 billion. New projects also draw on money customers pay up front — the US Air Force, for instance, put $30 million into the Raptor engine in advance.

SpaceX plans two commercial Falcon Heavy launches in 2018, for Arabsat and the US Department of Defense. In 2019 it plans to fly tourists around the moon.

Images/SpaceX