SpaceX just officially announced 6 Falcon Heavy launches in 12 months
The announcement of the Falcon Heavy in early April 2011 was a big game-changer in the space launch industry.
The Falcon Heavy is able to launch twice the payload of the Shuttle at about one-fifteenth the cost of a Shuttle launch — an approximate 95% reduction in launch costs compared with the Shuttle!
However, despite being the most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy has been sleeping since 2019, when it last flew!
That is about to change, though, as a SpaceX executive just announced that the company will launch Falcon Heavy up to six times in the next 12 months.
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Following years of delays and anticipation as SpaceX waited for the right moment to move forward with the massive rocket, Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 by launching CEO Elon Musk’s original Tesla Roadster into interplanetary space. The debut was nearly flawless and only marred by the loss of one of the rocket’s three first-stage boosters, which failed to touch down on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. In just a small taste of things to come, Falcon Heavy’s second launch followed 14 months later.
That April 2019 launch marked the rocket’s first commercial mission and sent a large communications satellite into an extra-energetic geostationary transfer orbit. Less than three months later, Falcon Heavy completed its third launch – a demonstration mission for the US Air Force.
Such a quick turnaround raised hopes, but that optimism was unfortunately unfounded. 39 months later, it’s still hard to say when Falcon Heavy will finally launch for the fourth time.
For years, all supposedly near-term Falcon Heavy launches have been more or less indefinitely delayed by payload problems. SpaceX has had no issues building and qualifying a huge amount of Falcon Heavy hardware for those missions, but the lack of payloads ready to fly has forced the company to find places to store all seven boosters – more than a third of its fleet – indefinitely.
That may finally change.
Speaking on a panel at the 2022 World Satellite Business Week, SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Tom Ochinero told the audience that the company has six Falcon Heavy launches scheduled in the next 12 months.
It’s possible that Falcon Heavy could end its launch hiatus and kick off that six-mission streak in the very near future. Spaceflight Now, a reliable source of launch schedules, recently updated its Launch Schedule to move Falcon Heavy’s USSF-44 mission up from late 2022 or 2023 to October 2022. Next Spaceflight, another reliable primary source, concurs. Both sources also agree that two additional missions (ViaSat-3 and USSF-67) could also launch this year.
SpaceX just officially announced 6 Falcon Heavy launches in 12 months
