More Powerful Falcon 9 Will Not Need Separate Certification, Company Says

SpaceX plans to fly its upgraded, more-powerful Falcon 9 rocket this summer, which the company says will be about 30 percent more powerful than the current version.

The online source Spacenews.com reports that company president Gwynne Shotwell (pictured) said at a satellite conference earlier this month in Washington, D.C. that the Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket will use the same Merlin 1D engines as the current booster, but will burn a modified fuel mix and have other changes that will extend the company's plans to re-use the boosters. Shotwell said the new booster has not yet been named by the company.

Shotwell said that the new Falcon 9 booster will be essentially the same as one of the "side sticks" of the Falcon Heavy, which has an inner core and two side boosters. That way, she said, the company is only building two different cores "to make sure we don't have a bunch of configurations around the factory so we can streamline operations and hit a launch cadence of one or two a month from every launch site we have."

Shotwell said the first flight of the upgraded Falcon 9 will carry a telecommunications satellite for SES of Luxembourg into geostationary orbit. Shotwell said SES has agreed to be the first to ride on the new booster.

Shotwell also said that, because of the similarities between the current and new Falcon 9 boosters, the upgraded version will not need to be certified separately by NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense to carry high-value payloads. She said certification of the Falcon 9 v1.1 is expected to be completed by midyear, and "there will be iterations that go on from there, but they will be certified as changes. It won't be certified as an entirely new rocket."

(Image provided by SpaceX)

FMI: www.spacex.com