You can consider this the start of NASA’s Falcon Heavy era. The launch of the Psyche asteroid mission this week is the opening act among five launches the space agency has directly reserved on SpaceX’s heavy-lift rocket over the next few years.
These Falcon Heavy flights will cut across NASA’s portfolio of robotic space missions, dispatching probes deep into the Solar System, deploying a flagship-class astronomical observatory, sending up a weather satellite, and launching the keystone to NASA’s Gateway mini-space station around the Moon.
The launch of the Psyche asteroid explorer, scheduled for Thursday from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, kicks it off. “We’ve been preparing for this for several years, and we’ve benefited from SpaceX’s manifest. They’ve launched four Falcon Heavies since last November,” said Tim Dunn, a NASA launch director based at the Florida spaceport.
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