Elon Musk/SpaceX via Instagram
SpaceX's first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket rolls out to a launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
- SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a Bangladeshi communications satellite on Thursday.
- But the main attraction will be the final version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, called Block 5.
- Falcon 9 Block 5 may deliver about 10% more thrust, a 10- to 100-fold improvement in reusability, and lower launch costs.
- SpaceX hopes to use the new rocket to launch NASA astronauts into space in less than a year.
On Thursday evening, SpaceX - the rocket company founded by Elon Musk - plans to launch Bangabandhu-1, which is slated to be Bangladesh's first geostationary communications satellite.
But spaceflight aficionados will mostly be gawking at a brand-new rocket carrying the payload: SpaceX's most powerful, most reusable, and possibly most affordable version of its Falcon 9 rocket to date, called Block 5 "full thrust."
Falcon 9 is the rocket that SpaceX launches most often. More than 50 of the workhorse rockets have launched in eight years. They've ferried thousands of pounds of cargo to and from the International Space Station, put dozens of commercial satellites into orbit, launched classified military payloads, and raked in billions of dollars.
Yet SpaceX engineers have constantly tinkered with the rocket over the past decade, adding new features, increasing efficiency, and boosting power. But Musk has said Falcon 9 Block 5 is the "final version."
The company hasn't publicly released any official specifications for the new rocket, and SpaceX representatives did not respond to Business Insider's request for them. Yet over the past year or so, Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, have described many of the changes.
Below is a summary of what to expect from the latest and last iteration of Falcon 9, based on our previous reporting, a list of changes compiled by Reddit's r/SpaceX community (which we first heard about from Eric Berger at Ars Technica), and other sources.