SpaceX ‘heavy’ rocket blasts off in debut flight carrying Tesla sports car into orbit

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The world's most powerful rocket, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, roared into space through clear blue skies in its debut test flight on Tuesday from a Florida launch site where moon missions once began, in another milestone for billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private rocket company.

The 23-story jumbo rocket, carrying a cherry red Tesla Roadster automobile into space as a mock payload, thundered off its launch pad in billowing clouds of steam, smoke and ash at 3:45 p.m. EST at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

Boisterous cheering could be heard from SpaceX workers at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where a livestream feed of the event originated.

Musk previously said one of the most critical points of the flight would come as two side boosters separated from the central rocket within minutes of launch. That occurred seemingly without a hitch.

Then, capitalizing on cost-cutting reusable rocket technology pioneered by SpaceX, the two side-boosters flew themselves back to Earth for safe simultaneous touchdowns on twin landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station about 8 minutes after launch.

But the center booster rocket, which SpaceX had predicted was less likely to be salvaged, slammed into the Atlantic at about 300 mph, showering the deck of the nearby drone landing vessel and destroying two of the ship's thrusters, Musk told a post-launch news conference.

The launch, so powerful that it shook the walls of the press trailer at the complex, was conducted from the same site used by NASA's towering Saturn 5 rockets to carry Apollo missions to the moon more than 40 years ago. SpaceX has said it aspires to send missions to Mars in the coming years.

The successful liftoff is a key turning point in Silicon Valley entrepreneur Musk's privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, which stands to gain a new edge over the handful of rivals vying for lucrative contracts with NASA, satellite companies and the U.S. military.

Falcon Heavy is designed to place up to 70 tons into standard low-Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch. That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet – the Delta 4 Heavy of rival United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co – for about a fourth the cost.

The demonstration flight put the Falcon Heavy into the annals of spaceflight as the world's most powerful existing rocket, with more lift capacity than any space vehicle to fly since NASA's Saturn 5, which was retired in 1973, or the Soviet-era Energia, which flew its last mission in 1988.

Propelled by 27 rocket engines, the Falcon Heavy packs more than 5 million pounds of thrust at launch, roughly three times the force of the Falcon 9 booster rocket that until now has been the workhorse of the SpaceX fleet. The new heavy-lift rocket is essentially constructed from three Falcon 9s harnessed together side-by-side.

Adding to the whimsy, SpaceX planted a space-suited mannequin in the driver's seat of the convertible Tesla Roadster.

Musk mused that "it may be discovered by some future alien race." The white spacesuit was real, he said.

A third burn was successful, Musk Tweeted late on Tuesday, sending the Tesla Roadster into its planned trajectory.

"Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt," he tweeted.

The roadster, which carries a plaque inscribed with the names of more than 6,000 SpaceX employees, could instead end up in perpetual Earth orbit.

(Additional reporting by Irene Klotz)