"If that thing goes up 200 feet and explodes, I'm jumping in the water"—so says one of the tens of thousands of spectators who made the pilgrimage to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. We're looking at Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket on the launch pad about three miles away, across one of the ponds of Cape Canaveral's marshy wetlands, awaiting its maiden voyage.

It's a nervy day. The launch window was to open at 1:30 p.m. Then it slips an hour, and another hour after that as SpaceX waits for winds to die down in the upper atmosphere. Finally, a liftoff time is set for 3:45 p.m. The day's window closes for good at 4. People start to murmur the word "scrub."

But then SpaceX starts to fuel the rocket. First comes the RP-1 kerosene rocket fuel, then the LOX with its distinctive venting. Falcon Heavy snarls on the pad. At 3:45 on the money, an enormous plume erupts from under the rocket, and it starts to climb. At first, actually, it crawls. The upward propulsion must equal the force of gravity pulling down on the 3-million-pound rocket before it will budge. The first inches take the longest.



Falcon Heavy side boosters landing at Cape Canaveral after maiden flight, February 6, 2018. SpaceX

Your eyes perceive liftoff first as the sound races to catch up, like a bolt of lightning and the following thunderclap. A low rumble rises from Falcon Heavy, peppered by popcorn snaps, until the bleachers vibrate and the window panes rattle. The rocket continues burning fuel, getting lighter by the second, and starts to accelerate up into the sky, ultimately reaching speeds above 20,000 kilometers per hour.

The launch is a smashing success. Falcon Heavy's two side boosters returned to Kennedy to land in unison (though the other stage didn't stick its landing), and Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster went flying out into space. All of us watching knew we'd just seen history, but no one knew just what comes next. Excitement swirled about large new satellites, payloads to Mars, experimental military spacecraft, and perhaps a chance, one day, to fly aboard a SpaceX rocket yourself.

But as I watched Falcon Heavy arc to the east over the Atlantic, burning rocket fuel as well as my eyes, all I saw were flights to Neptune.

The Next Wave

Not too long ago, perhaps just 20 years, the prevailing view in planetary science was that the small, distant bodies of the solar system, like Saturn's moon Enceladus, must be cold, hard, and desolate. The opposite turned out to be true. Active geology and flowing liquid are found not only on intriguing worlds like Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, but on virtually every rocky body all the way to Pluto. It has become clear that life could exist on another world right here in the solar system.



Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus. For years scientists thought Enceladus, which is only 310 miles in diameter, must be frozen solid. When the Cassini spacecraft visited the moon in 2005, however, it found that that the icy world has active geysers spraying water out into space. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

So when are we going? Consider that NASA has three Solar System Programs to launch spacecraft to other planets. There is Discovery, which manages relatively low-cost missions like the MESSENGER probe to Mercury and the upcoming InSight Mars lander. There is New Frontiers, a program that includes New Horizons' historic flight to Pluto and the Juno probe now orbiting Jupiter. And there are NASA's Flagship missions—the big-money endeavors such as the Voyager probes, the Cassini mission to Saturn, and the Mars Curiosity rover.

In the first half of the 2020s, we should see two Discovery missions launch, a New Frontiers mission, and an interplanetary Flagship. The Discovery missions are Lucy and Psyche. Lucy will explore the poorly understood Trojan asteroids that orbit along with Jupiter, while Psyche will look at a metal asteroid in the belt that's thought to be a leftover from a destroyed protoplanet.



The New Frontiers mission for 2025 has yet to be selected, but NASA has narrowed it down to two options. The first is CAESAR, a comet sample-return mission to 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (the same comet visited by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft). The second possible mission is Dragonfly, an eight-propellor rotorcraft to fly in the thick methane atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It would become the first human craft to fly in the atmosphere of another planetary body.

A mosaic of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa, made by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

NASA's next interplanetary Flagship mission is the Europa Clipper. The Clipper will orbit Jupiter and make 45 close passes of its fourth-largest moon, Europa, flying as low as 16 miles from the surface. The icy moon likely harbors a global subsurface ocean with more water than Earth, and Europa may be the most likely place in the solar system to find extraterrestrial life.

These four missions—Lucy, Psyche, Europa Clipper, and either CAESAR or Dragonfly—represent the next wave of robotic solar system exploration. But it's tempting to dream of the other worlds that will, for now, go unvisited. A growing group of scientists are pushing for a new lander or rover to explore the surface of Venus. Since the end of the Cassini mission in September 2017, astrobiologists have been clamoring to get back to Saturn's watery moon Enceladus. And the two ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, lurk in the far reaches of the system, visited but once by Voyager 2 thirty years ago.

Perhaps a little fire on the launch pad can get us on our way to these tantalizing worlds.

Pick Your Rocket

Falcon Heavy, with its great lifting capability and low cost, could prove a handy vehicle for interplanetary missions. "You can imagine a number of possibilities that are only in the drawing board phase," says Jack Burns, an astrophysics professor at the University of Colorado and recent member of the NASA transition team. "This could include a mission to orbit Pluto which requires a more massive spacecraft than New Horizons, missions to the moons of Saturn, [and] sample return from Mars, [which] requires multiple launches."

Falcon Heavy on Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, the same pad that hosted the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, February 5, 2018. Jay Bennett

As you might imagine, though, it's not that easy to fly multi-million or billion-dollar missions for NASA. The first big hurdle to consider is the meticulous approval process. You can read all about it here, but in a nutshell, it breaks down like this: there are three Launch Vehicle Risk Categories from Category 1 (most risky) to Category 3 (least risky). The spacecraft itself is assigned a Payload Class from A to D, with A assigned to the most important spacecraft and D the least.

The process makes sure the most important spacecraft, like Europa Clipper, can launch only on the most proven rockets. As a result, the space missions of the early 2020s are unlikely to fly on Falcon Heavy simply because there isn't enough time, according to Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society. The Europa Clipper needs to commit to a launch vehicle by next year, Dreier says, and it's "very unlikely" that Falcon Heavy flies the mission.

The Clipper is an interesting case, however. NASA is hoping to launch the mission on the Space Launch System (SLS), its enormous rocket for crewed missions to the moon and possibly Mars. As NASA's own launch vehicle, the SLS does not need to go through the same certification process that commercial rockets do—but the giant rocket could cost more than a billion dollars to launch. "I suspect there may be some political pressure to launch the Clipper on the SLS, but that’s hard to say right now," says Burns.

The big advantage of launching Europa Clipper on SLS is that it would only take about 2.5 years to fly directly to Jupiter, while the private options—Falcon Heavy and United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy—would need to send the 4,000-kg Clipper on a tour of the inner solar system, performing multiple gravity assists at Earth and Venus on a journey of more than seven years to Europa. However, the SLS's two-and-a-half year flight time to Jupiter is worthless if the Clipper is ready by 2022 but the rocket is not—which seems like a real possibility. Delta IV Heavy already has Category 3 certification, so if the mission launches in 2022, Delta could get the Clipper.

The New Frontiers mission launching in 2025, CAESAR or Dragonfly, "is more feasible, timing-wise," said Dreier when asked if the mission could launch on Falcon Heavy. But to achieve certification in time, the rocket will most likely need at least 14 consecutive successful launches, per NASA's policy.

A natural color view of Titan and Saturn taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 6, 2012, at a distance of approximately 483,000 miles (778,000 kilometers) from Titan. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Falcon Heavy has two more missions lined up for this year: Arabsat 6A, a communications satellite for Arabsat of Saudi Arabia, and Space Test Program-2 (STP-2), a launch for the Air Force carrying a batch of small military and science satellites. SpaceX says it has additional customers for Falcon Heavy as well. At a rate of 3 launches per year, the Heavy will have chalked up 15 launches by the end of 2022—plenty of time to position itself as the rocket for New Frontiers.

So I'm going to make a wager, based on nothing more than hopes and dreams: Dragonfly launches on Falcon Heavy in 2025 to begin its journey to Titan, where it will fly in the orange haze skies of a moon that's bigger than Mercury, exploring the methane seas and water ice mountains on the alien world.

Whether I'm right about Dragonfly or not (and that mission might not even be selected), the spacecraft that will launch on Falcon Heavy are only a small part of what the rocket represents: a new era of affordable, reusable, commercial launch vehicles that could transform how we access space—and how we probe the depths of a planetary neighborhood we are only just beginning to understand.



Space Race

"We want a new space race," Musk said at a press conference after the Falcon Heavy Launch. "Space races are exciting."

He's going to get one. SpaceX might be king of the hill right now, with the most cost-effective and sexiest rockets on the market, but you better believe other companies have the front runner in their crosshairs.

Falcon Heavy launching from Kennedy Space Center on its maiden flight, February 6, 2018. SpaceX

"Remember that Blue Origin expects to have its New Glenn vehicle operational within a year or so and it is also [doing] a heavy lift rocket," Burns tells Popular Mechanics. "In addition, ULA is quickly progressing with its Vulcan that will be similar to the Falcon Heavy. So, SpaceX may have a run for its money."

Falcon Heavy is first out of the gate in a new class of rockets capable of launching craft beyond Earth orbit, but Vulcan and New Glenn should be able to fling things to the far reaches of the solar system as well. "From the perspective of the space science community, this is wonderful because competition will continue to lower launch costs," Burns says.



SpaceX's biggest competitor at the moment is the United Launch Alliance, the cooperative effort of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two of the biggest aerospace contractors in the world with extensive connections and deep coffers. A lot has been made of how Falcon Heavy outclasses ULA's two workhorse rockets: Atlas V and Delta IV. But things are about to change. ULA is preparing to replace both Atlas and Delta with the new, more efficient Vulcan rocket. The company enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the U.S. launch market for years—until SpaceX showed up and undercut its costs. ULA's response is a cheaper, partially reusable rocket.

Diagram of the Vulcan rocket. United Launch Alliance

"The Atlas and Delta are going away, so we are looking at all new rockets with comparable history and reliability," says Burns. "The commercial sector has pressed the reset button."

Vulcan is slated to debut in 2020, according to ULA CEO Tory Bruno, and would replace both Atlas and Delta. ULA plans to recover the main engines of Vulan after every launch using a parachute to slow them down and a helicopter to snatch them out of the sky. According to ULA, this method will save 90 percent of the cost of Vulcan first stage boosters. Mid-flight capture is a proven and cost effective way to recover things that have left the ground, and Boeing and Lockheed have plenty of helicopters kicking around.

Then there's the wild card, Blue Origin, lurking in its absolutely enormous rocket factory just outside of Kennedy Space Center. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is building the main engine for ULA's Vulcan, the methane-burning BE-4, so some of ULA's hopes hinge on whether Blue Origin can deliver (although ULA also has a backup plan to use a kerosene-burning engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne if the BE-4 falls through).

Concept image of the New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin

Bezos' rocket company isn't going to sit on the ground while SpaceX and ULA duke it out in the sky, though. In the coming year, the company plans to debut New Glenn, a heavy-lift rocket with 3.85 million lbs. of thrust, making it only slightly less powerful than Falcon Heavy. Like Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard rocket, New Glenn is designed to be largely reusable thanks to vertical propulsive landings. It's hard to say if Blue Origin will meet its timeline goals, but monsters have emerged from their lairs before, and with Bezos' backing, New Glenn could surprise us all.

These three rockets will fuel a new space race, one fought between engineering firms rather than superpowers, and the possibilities for exploration have never looked brighter. Everything from internet satellites to lunar infrastructure to space telescopes to Mars habitats to flights to Jupiter and beyond will be more readily available thanks to the launch competition.



Spurred by the new class of affordable rocket, deep space exploration probes, like Earth-orbiting satellites, could see spacecraft get smaller, cheaper, and less risk-averse, allowing the rockets to launch missions to the giant planets early and often. Perhaps a new NASA Solar System Program, with a smaller budget than Discovery, could pump out small, single-purpose spacecraft to fling to all ends of the system, extending humanity's footing in the small part of the cosmos that surrounds our little blue world.

There are hundreds of ways to determine which company is leading the race, including costs, performance, flight frequency, past successes and future prospects. But in my book, the first rocket to launch an orbiter to Neptune wins.

An image of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 4.4 million miles from the planet, Aug. 20, 1989. NASA

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