SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, World’s Most Powerful Rocket, Soars Towards Mars

In what was dubbed as the beginning of a new space age, the SpaceX's Falcon Heavy - the world's most powerful rocket - blasted off Tuesday on its maiden test flight, carrying Elon Musk's personal Tesla roadster toward Mars.

The Falcon Heavy has the ability to lift nearly 140,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit and over 37,000 pounds to Earth-escape trajectories to Mars. It provides a heavy-lift capability, which has not been seen since the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo era in the early 1960s. It will help with interplanetary exploration and is expected to make human travel to Mars possible before the middle of the century.

As it lifted off, the boosters produced thrust equivalent of about 18 Boeing 747 airplanes at takeoff. The experimental 23-story rocket was lifted skywards by three reusable boosters, two of which managed to successfully guide back to the Earth in a major feat. The two touched down around 1,000 feet from one another on SpaceX’s concrete landing pads. The third one, which was supposed to land back on a drone ship parked hundreds of miles away, failed after the ship lost contact.

The rocket has brought the cost of space exploration lower. A similar rocket being developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for heavy-lift missions is estimated to cost about a billion dollars per flight whereas SpaceX estimates that Falcon Heavy launches will cost about $90 m per flight. Reusing hardware, including boosters, is part of SpaceX's plan to bring down the cost of launches. In the future, the rocket could be used for launching heavy national security satellites or even sending large modules into deep space.

SpaceX first announced its plans to develop the Falcon Heavy back in 2011 and was supposed to test launch the system as early as 2013 or 2014. However, two failures of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 pushed the launch further out than planned.