SpaceX’s most powerful rocket returns to flight and makes a synchronized landing

(CNN) — A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, a tall booster known for aerial acrobatics of its boosters and synchronized re-entry landings, took to the skies Sunday, carrying national security payloads for the US military into orbit.

The mission, called USSF-67, launched at 5:56 pm ET from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the fifth successful flight of the recently dethroned rocket as the world’s most powerful operational launch vehicle. The launch of this mission was originally announced to take place on Saturday, and the reason for the one-day delay was not immediately clear.

The Falcon Heavy debuted to great fanfare in 2018 when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attached his personal Tesla Roadster as a launch test payload. The car is still in space, moving on an oblong path around the sun that extends beyond the orbit of Mars.

The rocket continued this test mission with two launches in 2019, after which it took a three-year hiatus; the vast majority of SpaceX missions do not require the increased power of the Falcon Heavy. On the other hand, SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 launched more than 60 times in 2022 alone, sending two groups of astronauts into space, as well as Starlink satellites and many other spacecraft.

But now SpaceX is cashing in on lucrative military launch contracts it signed for Falcon Heavy a few years ago. The missile returned to flight in November with the launch of the US military mission USSF-44, and Sunday’s launch was a continuation of this demonstration.

“USSF-44 includes six payloads on a single satellite that propel communications, space weather sensing and other technologies into near-geosynchronous orbits,” the military’s Space Operations Command said.

And USSF-67 will use the same type of spacecraft. deployed on USSF-44 called LDPE which is essentially an outer space bus that can carry smaller satellites. Falcon Heavy also carried a communications satellite called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM for the US Space Force.

Additional details about Sunday’s mission satellites were not immediately available.

With each launch, the Falcon Heavy puts on a dramatic show on Earth.

After Sunday’s mission, the company rebuilt two of the Falcon Heavy’s first-stage boosters, tall white rods lashed together to give the rocket increased lift-off power. After using up most of their fuel, the side boosters broke away from the central core and reoriented to cut through the Earth’s atmosphere.

As they approached the ground, the boosters fired their engines again and made a synchronized landing on unpaved pads off the coast of Florida. This is a typical move for SpaceX, which is regularly refurbishing and reusing its rocket boosters to keep the cost of launches down.

SpaceX did not attempt to rebuild the central booster due to lack of fuel.

The company has not yet produced all three accelerators, although it is close to it. The two side boosters made precision synchronized landings on ground pads after the April 2019 mission, and the rocket’s central booster landed on the offshore platform. But the stormy waves overturned it.

All about this rocket

For many years, the Falcon Heavy was the most powerful operational rocket in the world. But in November, NASA’s new lunar rocket, called the Space Launch System, or SLS, stole that title on its first launch. SLS launched in the unmanned Artemis 1 mission around the Moon, paving the way for future missions with astronauts aboard.

While the Falcon Heavy puts out about 5 million pounds of thrust, the SLS delivers as much as 8.8 million pounds of thrust—15% more than the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo moon landings.

At its experimental facilities in South Texas, SpaceX is in the final stages of preparing for the first orbital launch attempt of its Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket. While the test flight is still awaiting final approval from federal regulators, it could begin in the coming weeks.

If successful, the SpaceX spacecraft will replace the SLS as the most powerful rocket flying today.

The Starship system is expected to outperform both the SLS and Falcon Heavy. The upcoming Super Heavy launch vehicle, designed to carry the Starship spacecraft into space, is expected to have about 17 million pounds of thrust.

However, this is not all competitions. Both the SLS rocket and the SpaceX spacecraft are an integral part of NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in half a century.

SpaceX has its own ambitious vision for Starship: to ferry people and cargo to Mars in the hope of one day establishing a permanent human settlement there.

The-CNN-Wire and © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc. a Time Warner company. All rights reserved.