The Falcon Heavy’s capacity could soon be superseded, however, by NASA’s in-development Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which could begin test flights in 2019 or 2020.Ī ride on a Falcon Heavy can be had for as little as $90 million, SpaceX officials say. This is less than half the “throw weight” of the famous Saturn V rockets that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 70s, but still roughly two times more than what’s on offer from the current heavy-lift champ, the Delta IV Heavy manufactured and operated by United Launch Alliance. In actuality, the rocket performed nearly flawlessly.Ĭomposed of three interlinked boosters each derived from SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket, the Falcon Heavy boasts 27 rocket engines in total, allowing it to lift about 140,000 pounds into low-Earth orbit. Musk, for his part, had pegged the chances of success at only 50/50, where “success” was defined as the rocket merely flying high enough to clear the launch pad before exploding. The big news here, though, isn’t actually the Falcon Heavy’s eccentric payload, but rather the mere fact that this behemoth of a rocket exists and is on the verge of regular operations.

But it is certainly the fastest, approaching a speed of 12 kilometers per second relative to Earth when it separated from the Falcon Heavy’s payload fairing en route to deep space. Instead, the Falcon Heavy's upper stage overperformed on its final burn, pushing the outer reaches of the Roadster's heliocentric orbit beyond Mars and into the asteroid belt.* The Roadster is neither the first car nor even the first electric model ever launched into space (the Apollo-era lunar rovers take both of those prizes). Launched with an earth-shaking roar from Pad 39a at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida-the same launch site of the Apollo 11 lunar mission in 1969 and the first space shuttle flight in 1981-the Roadster was planned to embark on an interplanetary trajectory looping between the orbital vicinities of Earth and of Mars.

On the dashboard display as Starman hurtled into the darkness, waiting in the sky? “Don’t Panic,” the tagline from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Earlier today, our sun gained a new satellite, courtesy of SpaceX’s first test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket: A cherry-red Tesla Roadster once driven by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, blasting tunes from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with a spacesuit-clad “Starman” dummy strapped in the driver’s seat.

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