SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy rocket with a commercial payload on board blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT) on April 11, 2019. The flight came more than a year after the rocket's first demonstration mission, which launched founder and CEO Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla and a dummy named Starman into orbit around the sun.
The Falcon Heavy is SpaceX's current megarocket, and is essentially composed of three of the company's standard Falcon 9 rockets strapped together. The April 11 mission launched an advanced communications satellite called Arabsat-6A, which will provide communications services to customers living in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe.
Full Story: SpaceX Falcon Heavy Sticks Triple Rocket Landing with 1st Commercial Launch
Onlookers turned out to enjoy the beautiful weather during the early-evening launch. The flight suffered a 24-hour delay from its previous launch attempt on April 10, on account of high winds at the pad.
This Falcon Heavy was the first to use Block 5 technology, which SpaceX rolled out to their Falcon 9 launches in May 2018. Block 5 versions are more powerful and designed to be more robust for the company to reuse.
SpaceX is hoping that, with Heavy's first commercial flight under its belt, it can increase the frequency with which the massive rocket blasts off. The company is targeting another launch in June, which would carry an Air Force satellite and several smaller science and technology payloads.
SpaceX will return to its Florida pad in just two short weeks for a Falcon 9 launch that will carry cargo to the International Space Station aboard a Dragon capsule.
In addition to the flawless launch, SpaceX also successfully landed all three first stages of the Falcon Heavy assemblage. They will be inspected by company staff and reflown on a future mission. SpaceX also intends to refly the payload fairing used during the mission, which it fetched out of the ocean shortly after the two halves dropped off the rocket before satellite deployment.
During the landing process, the two boosters touched down at a designated landing site and the core successfully came to rest on SpaceX's droneship, "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. This marks the first flight during which all three components successfully landed; during Falcon Heavy's initial launch, the core missed the droneship.
