On February 7th, SpaceX launched their Falcon Heavy rocket. The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket ever launched, more than doubling the carrying capacity of a NASA space shuttle. 
It’s also reusable, as its thrusters autonomously land on barges at sea.
The launch happened at 3:45 EST as over 100,000 people had gathered near the Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A rocket platform to watch the launch. The event was live-streamed on every major platform and had millions of viewers watching as the launch happened without any notable complications aside from a short delay due to unfavorable winds.
Minutes after the rocket launched, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and The Boring Company, who is the same guy who recently sold 20,000 flamethrowers in a 3 day span confirmed on Twitter that the rocket had left orbit successfully. Later indicating that both of Falcon Heavy’s launch cores 
, which are the thrusters on the sides of the main rocket, had safely landed at their target barges. The historic launch had proven not only that SpaceX can carry out a launch of a rocket of that size, but that their reusable rocket design functions reliably.
But that’s not even the most interesting part of the story. A private industry accomplishing a successful launch is momentous, but Elon Musk took the headlines a step further. He used the open payload of Falcon Heavy (an empty slot because this was just a test launch), to send his personal Red Tesla Roadster into space. Driven by a crash test dummy named “Starman,” the Roadster now travels through space towards Mars. 
Musk Tweeted that the launch had exceeded initial projections and instead of ending in the original target of Mars’s orbit, the Roadster will rather fly slightly past the planet into the Asteroid Belt. With the results of Tuesday’s launch, we can expect to see the Falcon Heavy back on LC-39A sometime by the end of the year.
Editor’s Note: All photos are used from SpaceX’s collection on Flikr, and they are under the CC0 1.0 usage rights.
