Falcon Heavy
SpaceX
SpaceX's heavy-lift partially reusable launch vehicle combining three Falcon 9 first-stage cores.
Key figurescomparable across the catalogue
- Payload capacity
- 63,800 kg
Normalised to common units so this product can be compared with others in its category. The supplier's own wording is below.
As published by the supplier
- Payload to LEO
- 63,800 kg (expended)
- Payload to GTO
- 26,700 kg (expended) / 16,800 kg (reusable)
- Total first-stage engines
- 27× Merlin 1D
- Height
- 70 m
- Liftoff thrust
- 22,819 kN
- Fairing diameter
- 5.2 m
- Propellant
- RP-1 / LOX
- Side booster reusability
- Yes (both side cores recovered)
About
Falcon Heavy is SpaceX’s heavy-lift launch vehicle, formed by attaching two Falcon 9 first stages as side boosters to a strengthened Falcon 9 core. With 27 Merlin engines firing simultaneously at launch, it is the most powerful operational rocket in the world by payload capacity. All three booster cores are designed to land and be recovered after flight.
Falcon Heavy first flew in February 2018, famously carrying Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster as a demonstration payload to a heliocentric orbit. Since then it has launched national security satellites for the U.S. government, commercial geostationary communication satellites, and NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission.
Two configurations are available: expended, in which the central core is not recovered and maximum payload capacity is achieved, and fully-reusable, in which all three cores are recovered. Both side boosters have frequently flown landing sequences with twin simultaneous landings at Cape Canaveral.
Falcon Heavy’s large fairing and high payload mass to GTO make it attractive for heavy geostationary communication satellites and government national-security payloads that exceed Falcon 9’s capacity.
Documentation
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