SpaceX carried out its first commercial launch on Thursday with its Falcon¹ Heavy rocket easing a Saudi telecoms satellite into orbit.

 

美国太空探索技术公司周四进行首次商业发射，用猎鹰重型火箭将沙特一颗通讯卫星送入轨道。

 

The bright white rocket rose with a roar and spewed thick gray smoke on the ground as it made its way up into clear blue skies over Cape² Canaveral, Florida, trailing a long plume³ of orange fire.

 

About 34 minutes after liftoff, the shiny silver satellite was successfully deployed⁴. Staff in the control room cheered and clapped.

 

Earlier, boisterous⁵ spectators chanted along with the launch announcer who counted down the final 10 seconds before liftoff.

 

The Falcon Heavy rocket exerts 5.1 million pounds of thrust -- that of more than a dozen jetliners, SpaceX said.

 

The rocket carried a Saudi Arabian satellite operated by Arabsat, a year after sending SpaceX founder⁶ Elon Musk's slick red Tesla roadster into orbit as a test.

 

The Falcon Heavy had been scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday but that was delayed because of strong winds in the upper atmosphere.

 

The job was to place the six-ton Arabsat-6A satellite into geostationary orbit about 22,500 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the Earth. It went off without a hitch⁷.

 

The satellite is designed to provide television, internet, telephone, and secure communications to customers in the Middle East.

点击收听单词发音