The long awaited Falcon Heavy launcher, built by SpaceX, finally has a planned date for its maiden flight! The 70 meter tall, 12 meter wide, and, when fully fueled, 1.4 million kilogram rocket is set to launch on the 6th of February, at 18:30 GMT, from Launchpad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida. There will be a 3 hour launch window, with a backup window set for the next day. This is not due to orbital requirements, as the payload is a dummy payload, but is rather set to be favourable to the SpaceX launch team.
As mentioned, the payload is not operational, in fact it's a PR move, for Elon Musk to promote the companies he's a CEO of. Thus, it will attempt to use the largest, most powerful rocket since the Space Shuttle, to send Tesla's first electric car, pictured to the right, in an orbit around the Sun, right around where Mars is. By the way, this is Elon Musk's personal vehicle, so, in his words, "Excitement on launch day guaranteed, one way or another", especially for him. Hopefully, the excitement will not come from an explosion, but from witnessing all three cores landing back on Earth successfully, two back at the launch pad, and one on the drone ship out in the Atlantic Ocean. I for one, am very hyped for this launch. If you are, too, make sure to check in again then. I'll be sure to make a post about it when the launch counter hits T-0.Yesterday, I had bad news regarding space operations, and I wrote this post, but as it turns out, the faulty fixture, newly mounted in the repair work done to the CanadArm 2 of the International Space Station (which I also covered here), has been fixed. Astronauts were supposed to replace it again tomorrow, reverting to the old one, as they believed that it was an internal hardware problem. But engineers from the Canadian Space Agency and the robotic arm's builder, Maxar Technologies, developed a software update and resolved the issue, thus canceling the replacement tomorrow, and reverting to the old mission parameters, as a spacewalk was planned for tomorrow, regardless.