SpaceX Falcon Heavy maiden flight delivers a Tesla to Mars

The test flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket was a resounding success. The first launch of a new rocket is always tricky, no commercial customer wants to risk a payload on an experimental flight so Elon Musk turned the whole thing into one big marketing spectacle. It was quite a gamble, but it paid of handsomely.

Rather than using concrete or metal blocks to simulate payload weight, Musk equipped the new rocket with his "midnight cherry" Tesla Roadster. As you probably know by now, the launch was a big success and there's now a car floating in space. The Tesla Roadster is supposed to end up in an elliptic orbit around the Sun, which will, in cosmic terms, bring it relatively close to Mars.

The launch was an amazing feat for SpaceX and it was filled with awe-inspiring footage, including all 27 Merlin engines lighting up, seeing the big rocket heading to space, the first view of the Tesla Roadster (with the Starman dummy) orbiting around Earth, and the simultaneous landing of the two side boosters!

The only small bummer is that SpaceX was unable to recover the center core of the Falcon Heavy rocket, because two of its three engines failed to reignite during the landing burn. The center core crashed into the ocean, just like all rockets used to do before SpaceX turned the space flight industry on its head.

Still, the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy marks another turning point or the space industry. Here we have a privately-funded rocket, it's not only the first private super heavy-lift launch vehicle but it's also the very first one that's reusable. All this for a launch cost of just $90 million, which puts another damper on NASA's much more expensive Space Launch System (SLS) (with its billion-dollar launch).

Falcon Heavy side cores have landed at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2. pic.twitter.com/oMBqizqnpI

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) 6 februari 2018

View from SpaceX Launch Control. Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth. pic.twitter.com/QljN2VnL1O

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 6 februari 2018

Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt. pic.twitter.com/bKhRN73WHF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 7 februari 2018