Falcon Heavy Rocket Makes History With Successful First Launch

The SpaceX launch vehicle just became the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V, which carried people to the moon.

This story has been updated as of of 11:10 p.m. ET

An extraordinary ballet was danced through the skies over central Florida on Tuesday, as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket passed its first test launch with (mostly) flying colors.

With its highly anticipated first flight behind it, the Falcon Heavy is now the world's most powerful operational rocket by a factor of two, capable of lifting 140,000 pounds of cargo into low-Earth orbit. Only the Saturn V rocket that sent humans to the moon has lifted so much, so far.

"I'm still trying to absorb everything that happened. It seemed surreal to me," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post-launch press briefing on Tuesday. "I had this image of an explosion on the pad, a wheel bouncing down the road, and the [SpaceX] logo landing somewhere—but fortunately, that didn't happen."

On the morning of the flight, excitement at NASA's Kennedy Space Center was palpable. Five hours before launch, more than a mile of traffic snaked out of the visitor complex's entrance, backing up past the brand-new factory of SpaceX competitor Blue Origin.

At 3:45 p.m. ET, the Falcon Heavy's 27 Merlin rocket engines staggered to life with a triumphant roar that could be heard for miles. The rocket lifted off from NASA's launchpad 39A—the point of departure for the Apollo moon missions and the space shuttle fleet—and began its ascent, carrying with it a modified Tesla Roadster blaring David Bowie's “Space Oddity.”

Watch Live Video of the Tesla Roadster in Space

In eight short minutes, Falcon Heavy's side boosters separated from the main stack, pirouetted in mid-air, and returned to land, as if the launch were being rewound.

The center section continued upward until it jettisoned the rocket's upper stage, and then it turned around to land on SpaceX's drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was bobbing along in the Atlantic Ocean. In the launch's immediate aftermath, it was unclear whether the center core stuck its landing.

Minutes after The Verge broke the news, Musk confirmed that the Falcon Heavy's center core missed its target drone ship, as many had feared. Musk attributed it to low levels of triethylborane—a hot-burning propellant that essentially acts as rocket engines' starter fluid—in the center booster. Not all of that booster's engines reignited during its descent, making it come down far faster than expected.

"Apparently, it hit the water at 300 miles an hour," said Musk, who added that the collision took out two of the drone ship's engines.

Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy First Flight

The missed landing, however, didn't disrupt an otherwise by-the-book launch. The Falcon Heavy's upper stage cleanly separated from the center booster, carrying the Roadster and its dummy-astronaut passenger aloft. Now, the vehicle is spending a foreboding five hours in the Van Allen belt, a swath of high-energy solar particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field.

The punishing radiation doesn't seem to have damaged the upper stage. At 10:46 p.m. ET, Musk confirmed in a statement on Twitter that the upper stage engine fired with enough power to kick the Tesla beyond the confines of Earth's gravity.

True to Bowie, the car is now floating in a most peculiar way: It's tracking on an elliptical orbit around the sun that will take it from Earth's orbit to the asteroid belt and back again.

SpaceX says that the Roadster could stably float out there for millions of years. And for a short while, at least, earthlings will get to ride along, thanks to three cameras mounted on the Roadster.

"It's a normal car in space—I like the absurdity of that," said Musk. "It's still tripping me out."

Race for Reusability

As National Geographic reported on Monday, the Falcon Heavy is poised to serve as a potent symbol for private enterprise's rush into space—which SpaceX has shaken up by emphasizing reusability.


But since 2008, SpaceX has set a number of spaceflight firsts with its Falcon 9 rocket, including successfully recovering and reusing some of its rocket stages, which helps bring down the costs of space travel. SpaceX's competitors charge more than three times the price of SpaceX for launching payloads half as massive as those possible with the Falcon Heavy. (Read more about what the SpaceX success means.)

“It's been a total shot across the bow,” said John Logsdon, a space-policy expert at George Washington University, in an interview on Sunday.

Now that Falcon Heavy seems to work, SpaceX will likely move ahead with its existing manifest, which includes the Saudi satellite Arabsat 6a and the U.S. Air Force's STP-2, a variety pack of satellites that includes a hyper-accurate atomic clock designed for deep space and a network of satellites that will monitor Earth's atmosphere.

“If we're successful in this, it is game over,” Musk said in a press briefing on Monday. “It'd be like ... if one aircraft company had reusable aircraft and all the other aircraft companies were single-use, you parachuted out at your destination, and your plane randomly crashed somewhere.”

Go Big

In some ways, though, the Falcon Heavy is an odd fit for the current rocketry market. SpaceX has effectively undercut the satellite market for Falcon Heavy by constantly upgrading its current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, and squeezing more performance out of it.

It's also unlikely that Falcon Heavy will launch humans off of Earth; Musk says that the Falcon Heavy probably won't go through the arduous certification process that crew-carrying rockets must endure. Instead, SpaceX will leapfrog straight to its Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, a gargantuan spaceship and 31-engine booster that would fulfill Musk's vision of interplanetary humans.

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It may sound ambitious, but Musk says that the BFR may be right around the corner. To the collective shock of reporters on the scene, Musk said in the Falcon Heavy post-launch briefing that he'd like to see SpaceX begin testing the BFR spaceship in short vertical hops next year. What's more, he says that SpaceX is aiming to land BFR cargo missions on Mars by 2022.

However, Musk himself admits that this hyper-aggressive timeline is “aspirational.” Consider, too, that the Falcon Heavy was beset by years of redesigns and delays.

In the meantime, it's possible that the Falcon Heavy will serve a greater role in scientific launches, sending smallish instruments to elsewhere in the solar system with astounding speed. As the Trump administration's National Space Council grapples with the future of human space exploration, it's also possible that Falcon Heavy will feature prominently in NASA's plans to return humans to the moon, or send them even farther.

"It can launch things straight to Pluto and beyond. It can launch satellites—it can do anything," Musk said.

“If I were a missions designer, as I was way back when, and I got the Falcon Heavy in my toolkit, I'd immediately start running launch scenarios—how much tonnage can I get in orbit around the moon?” says G. Scott Hubbard, a Stanford University aeronautics expert and former head of the NASA Ames Research Center. “That would immediately become part of your planning.”

But the path forward for Falcon Heavy is hardly smooth. To land high-priority, must-work launches, any rocket worth its salt must be demonstrated as reliable. A single launch shows that there are no fatal design flaws, but more launches are needed to prove the vehicle's long-term viability.

“It doesn't matter how much money you save if you lose your payload, because the government doesn't insure it—it can't insure it,” says Casey Dreier, the space policy director of the Planetary Society. “Reliability is going to be the key factor.”

What's more, SpaceX is hardly alone. As The Verge's Loren Grush noted in May, SpaceX and its competitors are barreling toward developing ever-more capable rockets, some of which may overlap with NASA's in-progress Space Launch System megarocket.

No matter which rocket wins hearts and contracts, Musk and others in the space community remain resolute that these kinds of advances in spaceflight represent big ideas that can fundamentally change the human experience.

“Why are we doing this? It's to do two things: It’s to advance human presence in any form beyond Earth [and] being able to send spacecraft, telescopes, people further out beyond low-Earth orbit,” says Dreier. “We're building a capability to challenge ourselves to explore and understand the cosmos, which is actually a really beautiful thing that we do as a species.”

Musk would add a third component to the pursuit: "I want a space race," he said. "Races are exciting."

Editor's Note: This story has been updated with quotes from Elon Musk and information on the fate of the Falcon Heavy's center booster.