In February 2018, Elon Musk's still young private space company SpaceX launched its first-ever reusable super-heavy launch vehicle, the Falcon Heavy. To make sure the moment goes down in the history books, Musk had his own Tesla Roadster sent into space as a dummy payload, carrying with it all sorts of other bells and whistles.
Since that first flight six years ago, the Falcon Heavy became one of the most reliable launch vehicles out there. It already performed a total of nine launches, carrying beyond the orbit of our world various satellites on behalf of several paying customers, and even the NASA Psyche asteroid explorer spacecraft.
SpaceX's bet on a super-heavy lifter seems to have paid off, so the company is now knee-deep in developing the next star of its spacecraft lineup, the Starship. Tied up as we are with seeing what the company is doing in the real world, we tend to forget that it was once involved in creating rocket concepts as well. One of these rockets is called Falcon XX.
You'll be forgiven if you don't really know what the XX is. In a nutshell, it's an idea that technically predates both kinds of Falcons in operation today (to which it is, of course, related). This is an idea that is fascinating to see, even in CGI form, as it kind of reminds us where this entire private space exploration business began.
The Falcon XX was one of SpaceX's early proposals for a heavy-lift rocket. It was imagined as a single-core launch vehicle powered by no less than six Merlin engines that were capable of delivering a combined 4,625 metric tons of thrust.
The rocket had, on paper, a diameter of almost 33 feet (ten meters) and measured from end to end no less than 328 feet (100 meters).
During the design work SpaceX's rocket scientists did not provide any specifications for the rocket's upper stage, but it probably would have been able to deliver payloads to low-Earth orbit. It's unclear how much the payload would have weighed, but it is believed it would have been significantly more capable than the Falcon Heavy – for reference, that one can lift up 64 metric tons in a single run.
As it stands, the Falcon XX never came to be in the real world, but thanks to a computer animation specialist called Hazegrayart we're treated to a simulated instance of the rocket in action.
It may not be the most spectacular such video we've seen – after all, the XX is not doing anything the Falcon Heavy hasn't done before – but it still is an interesting 3-minute+ video of a never-before-seen rocket performing the task it would have been made for.
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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