Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, on Friday, launched NASA‘s Psyche mission and the CEO is in “love” with the space agency.
What Happened: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launched NASA’s Psyche mission from Florida at 10:19 a.m. ET. The Psyche spacecraft will now travel to a metal-rich asteroid called Psyche orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Mars. The 279-kilometer asteroid rich in iron-nickel is the only metal-class asteroid ever to be explored.
“Congrats to NASA & SpaceX teams for successfully launching the Psyche probe to interplanetary transfer orbit!,” Musk wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“I love NASA!,” he wrote in another post.
The spacecraft will commence orbiting the asteroid only six years later in August 2029. “The spacecraft now begins its six-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey to a metal-rich asteroid,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a post after launch. The mission is expected to provide new insight into the formation of Earth’s solar system.
Why It Matters: Musk has appreciated NASA several times in the past. When NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship to land astronauts on the lunar surface as part of the Artemis Mission in April 2021, Musk put out a post that read, “NASA Rules!!”
The CEO has also commended China’s space program in the past as “more advanced than most people realize” before the country launched three astronauts to its space station in May.
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Read More: Elon Musk’s Starlink Plans Direct-To-Cell Service: Texting Next Year, Voice And Data Coming In 2025
Image created with artificial intelligence on MidJourney and Official SpaceX Photos on Flickr
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