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NASA’s Plan to Turn the ISS Into a Quantum Laser Lab

Later this summer, physicists at the Argonne and Fermi national laboratories will exchange quantum information across 30 miles of optical fiber running beneath the suburbs of Chicago. One lab will generate a pair of entangled photons—particles that have identical states and are linked in such a way that what happens to one happens to the other—and send them to their colleagues at the other lab, who will extract the quantum information carried by these particles of light. By establishing this two-way link, the labs will become the first nodes in what the researchers hope will one day be a quantum internet linking quantum computers around the nation.

A quantum web is loaded with potential. It would enable ultra-secure data transmission through quantum encryption. Astronomers could study distant galaxies in unprecedented detail by combining the rare intergalactic photons collected by individual optical telescopes to create a distributed superscope. Linking small quantum computers could create a quantum cloud and rapidly scale our computing abilities. The problem is that quantum information hates long-distance travel. Send entangled photons out into the real world through optical fiber and, in less than 50 miles, environmental interference will destroy their quantum state. But if the photons were relayed through a satellite instead, they could be sent to destinations hundreds—and potentially thousands—of miles away. So in 2018, NASA partnered with MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to develop the technologies needed to make it happen.

The goal of the National Space Quantum Laboratory program, sometimes referred to as Quantum Technology in Space, is to use a laser system on the International Space Station to exchange quantum information between two devices on Earth without a physical link. The refrigerator-sized module would be attached to the outside of the space station and would generate the entangled photons that carry the quantum information to Earth. The demonstration would pave the way for a satellite that could take entangled particles generated in local quantum networks and send them to far-flung locations.

“In the future, we will likely see quantum information from Argonne routed through a sequence of satellites to another location across the country, or the world,” says David Awschalom, a senior scientist and the quantum group leader at Argonne National Laboratory. “Much like with existing telecommunications, developing a global quantum network may involve a combination of space- and ground-based platforms.”

NASA is not the first to take quantum technologies to space. In 2016 China launched a satellite that sent a pair of entangled photons to two cities more than 700 miles apart. It was a critical test for long-distance quantum key distribution, which uses particles to encrypt information in a way that is almost impossible to break. It demonstrated that entangled particles could survive the journey from space to Earth by randomly sending photons to two ground stations and comparing when they arrived. If two photons arrived at the same time, they must have been entangled.

It was a groundbreaking demonstration, but “you can’t use that to generate a quantum network, because the photons are arriving at random times, and it wasn’t sending any quantum information,” says Scott Hamilton, who leads the Optical Communications Technology group at MIT’s Lincoln Lab. In this sense, what NASA is pursuing is totally different. The agency wants to use a technique called entanglement swapping to send quantum information carried by entangled particles from one node on the ground to another. This requires being able to send entangled photons with very precise timing and measure them without destroying the information they carry.

Entanglement is the source of many of the advantages of a quantum network, since it allows for information to be exchanged between two particles no matter how far apart they happen to be—what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.” These particles are typically photons, which can be thought of as the envelopes carrying letters full of quantum information. But this information is notoriously delicate. Too much interference from the outside world will cause the information in the quantum missives to disappear like vanishing ink.

The WIRED Guide to Quantum Computing

Everything you ever wanted to know about qubits, superpositioning, and spooky action at a distance.

Typically, entangled photons are generated from a single source. A laser is fired at a special kind of crystal, and two identical photons pop out; one copy stays with the sender, the other goes to the receiver. The problem is that entangled photons can’t be amplified as they travel from sender to receiver, which limits how far they can travel before the information they carry is destroyed. Entanglement swapping is the art of entangling photons generated from two different sources, which allows the photons to be passed from node to node in a network similar to how a repeater relays optical or radio signals in a classical system.

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“Entanglement swapping is a necessity to propagate entanglement over large distances,” says Babak Saif, an optical physicist at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center. “It’s the first step toward a quantum internet.”

In NASA’s system, a pair of entangled photons is generated on the International Space Station and another pair of entangled photons is generated at a ground station on Earth. One of the photons from space and one of the photons generated on Earth are sent to a quantum device that performs a bell measurement, which determines the state of each photon. This simultaneous measurement causes the remaining photons from their respective pairs—the one in space and the other on Earth—to become entangled, despite being generated by different sources. The next step is to send the remaining photon in space to a different ground station on Earth and repeat the process. This entangles the photons at each ground station and establishes a connection between the two quantum devices without a physical link.

It all sounds good in theory, but Saif says just getting the timing right is a major challenge. Entanglement swapping requires both photons—the one from space and the one from Earth—to arrive in the measurement system on Earth at the exact same time. Moreover, the photons need to be able to hit a small receiver with perfect accuracy. Achieving this level of precision from a spacecraft 250 miles away moving 17,000 miles per hour is every bit as hard as it sounds. To make it happen, NASA needs a damn good space laser.

NASA’s last major experiment in space laser communications was in 2013, when the agency sent data to and from a satellite orbiting the moon. The experiment was a huge success and allowed researchers to send data from the lunar satellite to Earth at over 600 megabits per second—that’s faster than the internet connections in most homes. But the lunar laser link wasn’t long for this world. Shortly after the experiment, NASA plowed the satellite into the moon so researchers could study the dust it kicked up on impact.

“Unfortunately, they crashed a perfectly good laser communication system on purpose,” says David Israel, the Exploration and Space Communications Projects Division architect at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center. But he says the experiment laid the groundwork for the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) satellite, which is scheduled to launch early next year. This new satellite will spend its first few years in orbit relaying laser communications from a ground station in California to one in Hawaii so Israel and his colleagues can study how the weather affects laser communications.

The long-term vision is to transition the satellite from an experiment to a data relay for future missions. Israel says its first operational user will be the ILLUMA-T experiment, an acronym so tortuous that I am not even going to spell it out here. ILLUMA-T is a laser communication station that is scheduled to be installed on the International Space Station in 2022 and will relay data through the LCRD satellite to the ground to experiment with laser cross-links in space. “The goal is to connect it to the onboard systems so that LCRD and ILLUMA-T are not so much experiments anymore, but another path to get data to and from the space station,” says Israel.

Together, ILLUMA-T and the LCRD satellite will lay the foundation for an optical communications network in space, which will enable the next generation of lunar explorers to send back high-definition video from the surface of the moon. But they will also be used as test beds to qualify the laser technologies needed for NASA’s quantum communication ambitions. “Since we were already building an optical thing for the space station, the idea was, why not go the extra mile and make it quantum enhanced?” says Nasser Barghouty, who leads the Quantum Sciences and Technology Group at NASA.

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Hamilton and his colleagues at MIT Lincoln Lab are already building a tabletop prototype of the quantum systems that could be connected to ILLUMA-T. He says it will be used to demonstrate entanglement swapping on Earth and that a space-ready version could be ready within five years. But whether or not the system will ever be installed on the space station is an open question.

Earlier this year, Hamilton, Barghouty, and other quantum physicists gathered for a workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss the future of quantum communications at NASA. One of the main topics of discussion was whether to start with a quantum communication demo on the space station or proceed directly to a quantum communication satellite. While the space station is a useful test platform for advanced technologies, its low orbit means it can only see a relatively small portion of the Earth’s surface at a time. To establish a quantum link between locations that are thousands of miles apart requires a satellite orbiting higher than the ISS.

NASA’s plan to build a quantum satellite link is referred to as “Marconi 2.0,” a nod to the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who was the first to achieve a long-distance radio transmission. Barghouty says the main idea behind Marconi 2.0 is to establish a space-based quantum link between Europe and North America by the mid- to late-2020s. But the details are still being discussed. “Marconi 2.0 is not a specific mission, but a vaguely defined class of missions,” says Barghouty. “There are a lot of variations on the concept.”

Hamilton says he expects NASA will have a finalized road map for its quantum communication program in the next year or two. In the meantime, he and his colleagues are focused on building the technologies that will make the first long-distance quantum network possible. Although the exact form this network will take is still being discussed, one thing is for certain—the road to a quantum internet passes through space.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-plan-to-turn-the-iss-into-a-quantum-laser-lab/

telecommunications

NASA Went to the Stock Exchange to Try to Sell the ISS

On Friday morning, three senior members of NASA leadership gathered at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York to announce that “the International Space Station is open for commercial business.” The trio outlined the space agency’s plan for the world’s only orbital laboratory, a move they say would allow NASA to focus its resources on sending humans to the moon by 2024, the same year when US funding for the ISS was slated to end.

According to the plan outlined today, NASA will be rolling back its restrictions on for-profit and marketing activities on the space station. Companies will now be able to pay for astronauts to help advertise their products and use the space station facilities for manufacturing and other money-making ventures. Initially, NASA has limited purchasable crew time to 90 hours and 175 kilograms of commercial cargo per year. NASA also says it will open the space station to short-duration stays by commercial astronauts traveling on private spacecraft, which it says could begin as early as next year. Additionally, NASA says it will lease the last open port on the ISS, where a new module can attach, to a private company and expects to award that contract by the end of the fiscal year. “We’re trying to knock down all the barriers that have been around for awhile and see what the private sector can do to construct a business plan,” says Jeff DeWit, NASA’s chief financial officer.

Last month, NASA released a large study that outlined how leading companies, including Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, envisioned profiting off the ISS. As detailed in the report, the space station might turn into a hotel for tourists. Or a manufacturing center. Or a testbed for satellite technology and independent space stations. NASA’s 2019 budget earmarked $40 million for its Commercial LEO Development program, but until today it wasn’t clear how that money would be used. According to NASA officials, that money will be used in support of the goals outlined by companies in the study, but the specifics will depend on proposals submitted by the companies.

The peddling of the ISS is part of a broader trend that amounts to NASA handing off its assets to private companies. In 2017 the agency announced that Kennedy Space Center, the launch site for the Apollo and Shuttle missions, would become a “multi-user spaceport,” a euphemism for leasing many of its facilities to private contractors. And last year NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post that he was discussing the transfer of the ISS to a corporate conglomerate when funding ends in 2024. (NASA’s own Office of Inspector General characterized that ambition as unrealistic, and the Trump administration is no longer aiming to completely terminate ISS funding). Bridenstine also convened a committee to study ways to commercialize NASA, and even floated the idea of selling naming rights to rockets.

Vice President Mike Pence, the administration’s leading voice on space policy, is making the corporate takeover of space assets a pillar of his policy. As he put it in a National Space Council meeting last year, “there’s no reason our own federal government should stand in the way of the trailblazing companies that are forging and re-forging American leadership in space.”

But maybe there is a reason. The Trump administration is not the first to try to privatize low-Earth orbit and the space station—that honor goes to Ronald Reagan, the other celebrity-turned-president. As Reagan pushed for the creation of the ISS, he baked privatization in from its inception. A professed lover of outer space, UFOs, and science fiction, Reagan directed NASA to rewrite decades-old laws to make NASA more amenable to commercialization. Now many of the initiatives he spearheaded are coming to fruition under Trump, wrapped in the same free-market rhetoric and emotional appeals to American leadership.

Despite Reagan’s optimism about the glorious future of space capitalism, the market wasn’t ready to support his plans. It’s uncertain whether it will today, either.

“It’s like déjà vu,” says John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University who had voiced his skepticism of Reagan’s commercialization timeline in the 1980s. “We’re right back to where we were.”

When Reagan was sworn in as president in 1981, NASA’s space shuttle program was not even a decade old. He campaigned on the idea that free markets and private enterprise were key to American prosperity, and these ideas soon found their way into the government’s space program. His National Space Policy included, prominently, the expansion of the private sector’s involvement. As Logsdon notes in his recent book, Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier, “this was the first time a government role in encouraging commercial space activity had been called out in national space policy.”

The Reagan administration moved quickly to turn its ideas into action. First it transferred the operation of remote sensing satellites to private enterprise, specifically the Landsat program. Its attempts to broker a similar deal around reusable launch rockets, namely the space shuttle, were less successful. The ultimate prize, though, was a space station that would act as an orbital platform for commercial activities.

In support of that vision, NASA commissioned a series of studies to learn what sorts of commercial activities would benefit from a space station in 1982. Shortly thereafter, NASA administrator James Beggs convened a panel to study the “potential of private industrial and commercial development in space.” The commercial prospects highlighted by these discussions bear a striking resemblance to the opportunities highlighted by NASA officials at the stock exchange this week. As detailed in a 1983 New York Times article, low-Earth orbit was touted as a promising venue to develop new pharmaceuticals, manufacture electronics, establish telecommunications services, and collect remote sensing data, in addition to more traditional space activities having to do with rocket launches and in-orbit services. All told, these commercial activities were predicted to comprise an entirely new, multi-billion dollar market.

Reagan’s dreams of privatizing low-Earth orbit came crashing down—literally and figuratively—on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger blew up during flight and killed all seven astronauts on board. By the time shuttle flights resumed two years later, plans for the space station were on life support. As Congress was preparing its budget for 1989, there was a strong push in the senate to only provide a bare minimum of funding—about $250 million—for its development, far short of Reagan’s request of nearly $1 billion. The president fought back at NASA’s behest, and Congress ultimately agreed to appropriate $900 million for the space station’s development.

Reagan lived just long enough to see the first astronauts begin inhabiting the space station. In keeping with Reagan’s vision, the ISS has always hosted private payloads, but they’ve fallen far short of his ambitions. As detailed in a report published by NASA’s Office of Inspector General last year, the ISS has seen “scant commercial interest…over nearly 20 years of operation,” which raised big questions about whether it could be sustained through private investment alone after 2024. NASA’s trip to the Nasdaq stock exchange, then, can be seen as a sort of trial balloon.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if the agency is making the same mistakes, compelled by the unrealistic demands of a presidential administration. As Logsdon notes, Reagan’s push for the commercialization of space was “based on ideology and hope, not reality.” That administration ignored warnings that private space industry still needed significant government subsidy and did not undertake “independent analysis of whether those products [made in space] could compete with Earth bound equivalents, given the high costs of operating in space.” Yet as the space historian Joan Bromberg wrote in NASA and the Space Industry, “free enterprise was part of the US tradition, so to promote it in space was to defend the American way.”

So when Pence casts the commercialization of space as a patriotic mission to guarantee American leadership in the final frontier, he’s retreading old ground, once again leaning more on ideology and hope than reality. To be sure, many things have changed since the Reagan administration. Companies like SpaceX now regularly shuttle supplies to and from the ISS, a mission profile that was once the sole purview of NASA. The commercial remote sensing industry is growing at an unprecedented rate and is expected to become a multi-billion dollar industry in the next decade. The space telecommunications industry is also experiencing something of a renaissance, with companies like SpaceX, OneWeb, and even Amazon planning to launch thousands of internet satellites into orbit in the coming years.

But through it all, the ISS has been largely ignored. NASA insists there’s a business case for its orbital outpost. Using the facilities on the space station will be incredibly expensive, however, so it’s still not clear whether companies will find it attractive without significant government subsidy. Regardless of the outcome, when NASA visited Nasdaq this morning it made a Reagan-era dream come true.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-went-to-the-stock-exchange-to-try-to-sell-the-iss/

telecommunications

SpaceX Lands All 3 Boosters of the World’s Most Powerful Rocket

The Falcon Heavy rocket is many things, but “timely” is not one of them. Delay after delay have plagued its development. And this week, the same fate befell its launch schedule. Originally slated to lift off last Sunday, the Falcon Heavy’s first commercial launch was thrice delayed due to unfavorable weather conditions before it finally left launchpad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center today.

But it was worth the wait. The minute the launch window opened on Thursday, the rocket boosted its payload, a Saudi Arabian telecommunications satellite, toward geostationary orbit. Even from across several miles of water, the power of 5 million pounds of thrust was enough to rattle your ribcage. One nearly had to shout to be heard over the roar of the 27 Merlin engines as the rocket departed the launchpad, but few felt the need to say anything. Instead, most of the reporters I was with on the causeway cast their eyes to the sky, tracking the rocket between breaks in the low-hanging clouds as it boosted a 13,000-pound satellite thousands of miles above the Earth.

Less than eight minutes after launch, the rocket’s two side boosters appeared overhead, looking like two building-sized candlesticks in the twilight sky. As the rockets executed their final burn to perform a nearly simultaneous landing, two sonic booms ripped through the otherwise peaceful Florida night. Everyone on the causeway erupted in cheers after it was clear that both boosters had successfully landed, the tops of which could just be seen over the trees. Only a few minutes later, the center core attempted a landing on Of Course I Still Love You, a drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean 600 miles from the launchpad.

A handful of spectators were listening to a radio broadcast from the launch command center, waiting to hear the fate of the center core. The two minutes between the side boosters landing and the center core’s attempt were tense. During the Falcon Heavy’s demo flight last year, the center core landed in the water, and the resulting explosion damaged the drone ship. The botched landing was due to insufficient fuel to light some of the engines, CEO Elon Musk later revealed, but he said “the fix is pretty obvious.”

Whatever obvious fix Musk and the SpaceX crew employed this time around clearly worked. The center core nailed its landing on the drone ship, and once word made its way from SpaceX command center, the journalists and photographers assembled on the NASA causeway went absolutely wild. Only a few years ago, the idea of landing a rocket booster was unthinkable. Now, SpaceX had just aced a landing by three boosters from the same rocket.

Daniel Oberhaus

The company’s success was not guaranteed. Musk had warned his followers that SpaceX was being “extra cautious” ahead of the Falcon Heavy’s first commercial flight to give engineers the time to make sure it would go off without a hitch. The caution is understandable. Although the Falcon Heavy had flown a demo mission once before, this rocket used new Block 5 boosters, which are 7 percent more powerful than the ones used for the demo flight. “First flight for Falcon Heavy Block 5 means there is some risk of failure between 5% to 10% imo,” Musk had tweeted. “Many good design improvements from Falcon Heavy demo, but the changes are unproven.”

The success of the Falcon Heavy’s first commercial flight is good news for the Air Force. The next flight of the Falcon Heavy will be an Air Force rideshare mission that is expected to occur no earlier than mid-June. That launch will use the two side boosters that landed at Kennedy today to boost 25 satellites built by organizations including Georgia Tech, the Planetary Society, and NASA.

Musk has long said that he will consider SpaceX successful when landing rockets becomes boring. But after watching the world’s most powerful operational rocket go to orbit and then return each of its three first-stage boosters to Earth, I can’t help but think that SpaceX will never be successful—at least not by Musk’s metrics. The nearly simultaneous landing of the two side boosters is the most futuristic thing I have ever seen. In fact, one of the only things I can imagine that is more extraordinary than this feat of engineering would be treating it as mundane.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-lands-all-3-boosters-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-rocket/

telecommunications

Watch SpaceX Launch a Falcon Heavy on Its First Real Mission

Editor's note: Read our recap of the launch here.

A little over a year ago, SpaceX pulled off a showy first launch for its new rocket, the Falcon Heavy. The flight dispatched founder Elon Musk’s cherry-red Tesla convertible, with an empty spacesuit dubbed Starman in the driver’s seat, on a multimillion-year journey around the solar system. After the launch, the rocket’s three first-stage boosters returned to Earth to attempt an unprecedented synchronized landing.

Now that rocket is getting ready to fly again. The Falcon Heavy represents SpaceX’s ambition of competing for lucrative heavy-launch commercial and government contracts, which would require transporting payloads weighing more than 40,000 pounds into geosynchronous orbit. If this second flight is successful, the Falcon Heavy will be much closer to satisfying the military’s strict requirements and landing those deals.

The first commercial flight of the Falcon Heavy, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is expected to launch at 6:35 pm ET today (Thursday). Originally scheduled to fly on Sunday, the launch was delayed twice due to unfavorable weather conditions. This mission will carry a Saudi Arabian telecommunications satellite, dubbed Arabsat 6A, into a geosynchronous orbit, where it will provide television, internet, and telephone services for countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. A few minutes after launch, SpaceX will attempt to land each of the rocket’s three first stage boosters—two on landing pads near the launch site and one on a floating drone ship 600 miles off the coast. Last year, SpaceX successfully brought two boosters back to land, but fuel issues prevented the center core from sticking its landing.

As the most powerful operational rocket in existence by a factor of two, the Falcon Heavy is nothing short of a technological marvel. With the thrust equivalent of about 18 747 airliners, it can hoist around 140,000 pounds into low Earth orbit and 58,000 pounds into geosynchronous orbit, more than enough to handle the 13,000 pound Arabsat. The Falcon Heavy’s main selling point, however, is that it is the only heavy launch vehicle in the world that has reusability baked into its design.

Each of the Falcon Heavy’s three first-stage boosters are borrowed directly from SpaceX’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket, so named for the nine Merlin engines that provide its thrust. Unlike the Falcon Heavy’s first flight, which used an older model of booster, today’s vehicle will consist of three new block 5 engine cores. SpaceX first launched the block 5 Falcon 9 rocket last May, and has flown these boosters 13 times since. The block 5 is designed to fly at least 10 times with minimal refurbishment between launches, and it offers a 7 percent increase in thrust over its predecessors.

If the Falcon Heavy can prove its mettle, it could cut the cost of heavy launches dramatically. Since 2004, the US heavy launch market has been dominated by the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV heavy rocket, which has half the lift capability at approximately four times the cost. A single ride on the Delta IV heavy has been quoted at around $350 million, whereas a Falcon Heavy launch starts at $90 million for a brand-new rocket, a price point that may go as low as $70 million for launches using previously flown boosters.

For companies looking to launch a large satellite, the savings are significant. But SpaceX will likely find its biggest customer in the US government. The existence of the Falcon Heavy could be good news for future deep-space exploration missions, which often require heavy-launch capability to throw the spacecraft to Mars and beyond. These missions already have to fight to justify their cost, and between 10 and 20 percent of a mission price tag is generally reserved for the launch itself. If NASA can shave tens of millions of dollars off the cost of sending its spacecraft to other planets, these savings could, in principle, be used to develop exploration missions that would have otherwise been defunded.

To handle military payloads, SpaceX still faces a number of hurdles before the rocket is cleared for use. The Air Force reserved a flight on the Falcon Heavy in 2012, with an initial launch date scheduled for no earlier than 2015. That has yet to happen, but it didn’t stop the military from awarding SpaceX a $130 million contract to launch a classified satellite on a Falcon Heavy only months after its demo flight. Earlier this year, SpaceX won a second Air Force contract for another classified satellite that is expected to fly on the Falcon Heavy. In February, however, the Department of Defense launched an investigation into the military certification of SpaceX rockets for reasons that remain unclear.

These government deals are becoming increasingly important to SpaceX, especially with the commercial market for large satellites appearing to slow. Indeed, a perusal of the launch manifest for the Delta IV heavy shows that the majority of its flights over the past 15 years have hosted military payloads, and the ability to snag some of these lucrative contracts in the future would represent a major windfall for SpaceX.

The Air Force will undoubtedly be paying close attention to the Arabsat launch today, which will help prove that the rocket can safely deliver its sensitive payloads to orbit. Moreover, the two side boosters flying today are expected to be reused in the first Air Force mission this summer, assuming they land successfully back at Kennedy Space Center after their flight.

Meanwhile, the US military is helping to clear the way for a new generation of heavy-launch vehicles that will eventually compete against SpaceX. In March, the US government overhauled its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, which was created nearly two decades before SpaceX demonstrated a reusable rocket for the first time. Under these old guidelines, reusable heavy-launch vehicles under development, like the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, would’ve had a hard time qualifying for sensitive military missions since the rockets aren’t expendable. The new National Security Space Launch program will provide a clear pathway for certifying rockets using previously flown parts for military missions, a change largely driven by the success of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

Although it will eventually mean more competition, the military’s willingness to embrace the new generation of rockets is paying off for SpaceX. It already has two Air Force missions on the books for Heavy, the first of which is expected to fly as early as mid-June. Whether or not SpaceX can hit this target date depends on their ability to meet the rigorous certification standards for military contracts—and by sticking the landing of the Falcon Heavy boosters today.

Updated 4-11-2019, 1pm ET: The estimated launch time was revised.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/watch-spacex-launch-a-falcon-heavy-on-its-first-real-mission/