Just five months before Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, an unwieldy cluster of 30 engines roared into life beneath a monster rocket on a launch pad in Kazakhstan. Within seconds the uncrewed maiden launch of the Soviet Union鈥檚 N1 moon rocket was in deep trouble.
Its control system, and the complex plumbing that fuelled its motors, failed. Engine after engine shut down, causing severe vibrations, rupturing fuel lines and starting fires. The into the snow-covered steppe after just 3 minutes in the air. Three more test launches up to 1972 also failed, killing the dream of a cosmonaut on the moon.
You might be forgiven for thinking this would also spell the end for rockets 鈥� after all, NASA鈥檚 Saturn V had a much more manageable five. But far from it: engines and control engineering have improved vastly and Russia鈥檚 workhorse Soyuz, which reliably ferries crews to low Earth orbit, has 20 engines.
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But Soyuz is not designed to get people beyond low Earth orbit. Enter another monster 鈥� the 27-engine Falcon Heavy, by SpaceX for its maiden launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida, probably around mid-January. It would put the moon and Mars in range of private human spaceflight.
Boldly going
Choreographing so many engines will be just half the challenge: comprises three of SpaceX鈥檚 reusable, nine-engine Falcon 9 rockets strapped together. Its central, strengthened Falcon 9, with a payload-carrying second stage atop it, has two Falcon 9 first stages strapped to its sides as boosters. SpaceX will try to land all three of those first stages for further use. To ram the reuse point home, both the boosters have flown satellites to orbit before.
If this level of reusability and cost effectiveness can be achieved with Falcon Heavy, SpaceX will be boldly going where the economics of spaceflight have never gone before. Nascent firms planning asteroid, moon and Mars mining operations will be especially cheered.
But the launch will be tense: there is only so much that can be simulated and, just as in the USSR in 1969, there is a risk of unpredicted launch and aerodynamic stresses causing an explosion on the ground or in flight.
鈥淲ith the simultaneous ignition of 27 orbital class engines, there鈥檚 a lot that can go wrong,鈥� SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last summer. 鈥淚t鈥檚 one of those things that鈥檚 really difficult to test on the ground.鈥�
Cars on Mars
SpaceX is not alone in the race to develop a means to take people far beyond low Earth orbit. NASA is designing its Space Launch System; the Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture, United Launch Alliance, has a design called Vulcan in the wings; and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos鈥檚 space start-up, Blue Origin, has its New Glenn ship on the drawing board.
But Falcon Heavy is first to the starting line. And, if it works, its 27 engines will make it, for a short time at least, the most powerful rocket on Earth, capable of sending a 16-tonne capsule to Mars.
Strangely, followers of social media may be aware of 聽the mission details for far more idiosyncratic reasons: Musk has decided to use his old (he鈥檚 the chief of Tesla too) as Falcon Heavy鈥檚 dummy payload, injecting it into an orbit around the sun stretching as far out as Mars. Why? He鈥檚 deemed the usual choice of a as way too boring.
That鈥檚 debatable, but when those 27 rocket engines finally fire up for real in the weeks ahead, what happens next is likely to be anything but dull.
Read more: SpaceX plans to send two civilians around the moon;听Elon Musk鈥檚 new plans for a moon based and Mars mission by 2022
