It was business, as usual, today for SpaceX with their ambitious Falcon Heavy vehicle as I watched the rocket soar into the blue skies amidst cheers taking with it the aspirations of a billion humans to become interplanetary travellers. There was nothing about this first launch which would suggest SpaceX was testing this beastly projectile whose thrust would be equivalent to 18 Boeing 747 aircrafts or its technology of Falcon rockets with 27 core engines firing at full force during launch – the most by any working rocket, or even getting all the 3 stages back to the Earth safely. Everything went smoothly, just like the previous Falcon missions bringing SpaceX closer to realizing its potential of sending humans to Mars and beyond. For me though, that wasn’t the highlight of the launch today. What made it momentous was its rather uncommon payload of the ‘Starman’ in a SpaceX-designed space suit behind the wheels of Elon Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster which is right now orbiting the Earth on its way to Mars and will orbit the Sun indefinitely. On the Falcon Heavy, only time would tell how this behemoth will disrupt the commercial space industry.
View from SpaceX Launch Control. Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth. pic.twitter.com/QljN2VnL1O
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2018