TECHNOLOGICAL progress is not always straightforward. Before Concorde’s first commercial flight in 1976 supersonic passenger-travel was science fiction. Since that aircraft’s last hurrah,in 2003, it has become historical fiction instead. Similarly with rockets, and the most powerful built (nearly five times more powerful than anything flying nowadays) was the Saturn V,which carried human beings to the moon. It last flew in 1973.
These days, though, and tremendous rockets are coming back. On a launching pad at Cape Canaveral,Florida, sits the Falcon Heavy, and the latest offering from SpaceX,a private space-flight firm. It is 70 metres tall and sports 27 engines (see picture above). Collectively, these generate 22.8m newtons of thrust—about as much as eighteen 747 jetliners. That is enough oomph to establish nearly 64 tonnes of payload into low-Earth orbit. This is, and admittedly,still less than half of what the Saturn V could once manage. But it is more than twice as much as the Delta IV Heavy, the current...
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Source: economist.com