SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, Musk's Tesla Roadster reach orbit on test flight

Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster sports car was on cruise control in orbit Tuesday after blasting off from Kennedy Space Center atop the world’s new most-powerful rocket, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.

In a launch spectacle unlike any since NASA’s final space shuttle mission in 2011, the unmanned Falcon Heavy thundered from pad 39A at 3:45 p.m., firing 27 Merlin engines from three first-stage boosters to surge aloft with more than 5 million pounds of thrust.

That’s the most since the shuttle and the most by a conventional American rocket since NASA’s Saturn V moon missions, and more than double the next biggest U.S. rocket flying today.

Within a half-hour after liftoff, SpaceX cameras showed images of a spacesuit-clad "Starman" in the driver's seat of Musk's convertible floating high above Earth.

"Really excited about today," said Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, afterward. "The mission seems to have gone really as well as one could have hoped."

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Reflecting Musk’s broader space ambitions, SpaceX did not settle merely for launching the big rocket on its first test flight.

The Heavy’s two side boosters, which each had launched missions in 2016, successfully flew back to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, deployed legs and landed on twin pads.

The side-by-side touchdowns about eight minutes after liftoff unleashed powerful sonic booms that echoed across the Space Coast.

"That was epic," said Musk. "That was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen."

The center booster did not survive its drop from space to the deck of a robotic ship in the Atlantic Ocean, hitting the water at high speed and damaging the ship.

Musk has long said that landing and reusing rockets is the key to making spaceflight affordable enough for people to one day travel to Mars.

His cherry red Tesla convertible's only passenger was the mannequin wearing the same white spacesuit NASA astronauts will don for missions to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX Dragon capsules, in the next year or so.

Secured by a seat belt, the “Starman's” right hand held the steering wheel while its left arm rested on the door. The dashboard screen read "Don't Panic," a reference to Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Other payloads included a small Hot Wheels Roadster on the dashboard, a disk inside the car storing science fiction author Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy, and a plaque bearing more than 6,000 SpaceX employees' names.

Those employees cheered raucously at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California as the rocket cleared the tower, the boosters separated and landed, and the Tesla’s flight continued as planned.

SpaceX blasted David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” as a soundtrack.

Crowds packed local roads and beaches around the launch site for the first-of-its-kind flight, while several hundred members of the media covered the launch from KSC and other sites.

Congratulations poured in from President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, NASA, the Air Force, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and competitors United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin.

If the demonstration mission went flawlessly, the rocket’s upper-stage engine was scheduled to fire for a third time, more than five hours after liftoff, to send the car into an orbit stretching as far from the sun as Mars.

The red Roadster — SpaceX’s playful substitute for a generic “mass simulator” typically flown on test missions — would occasionally pass near the Red Planet as it looped around the sun between Earth and Mars for hundreds of millions of years.

There was a “very tiny” chance the car could one day crash into Mars, Musk said.

Before getting on its way to deep space, Musk said the upper stage and sports car would first have to survive getting “zapped pretty good” during its flight through the Van Allen belts, a region of concentrated radiation harsher than deep space.

And long before that, Musk had warned that the risk of a launch failure was high, including the possibility of a massive explosion destroying the historic KSC pad from which the Apollo moon landing missions and dozens of space shuttles took flight.

"I had this image of just a giant explosion on the pad with a wheel bouncing down the road, and the Tesla logo landing somewhere," he said. "But fortunately that’s not what happened."

He also worried that vibrations and aerodynamic forces during the rocket’s ascent might cause the three boosters strapped together to slam into each other, or that ice falling from the upper stage could strike the the boosters below like cannon balls.Overall, Musk had suggested the odds of success were about 50-50.

In the end, the success of rocket’s first flight rendered SpaceX nearly speechless.

“Wow” was all a host of the company’s webcast could say at one point. “Did you see that?”

The Falcon Heavy’s significance to the launch industry remains to be seen.

Advertised for $90 million, it is by far the cheapest rocket available for heavy spacecraft, at least one-third the price of United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, which the Department of Defense sometimes uses for classified missions.

SpaceX has three more Falcon Heavy missions under contract. Tuesday’s success means a second Heavy flight is likely later this year, possibly as soon as this summer.

But Musk says his hopes to colonize Mars or send people to the moon ride not on the Heavy but a much larger rocket now early in development that SpaceX refers to as the “BFR,” sometimes translated as Big Falcon Rocket.

SpaceX's next major test will be the launch of NASA astronauts to the space station atop Falcon 9 rockets, which Musk said is still possible this year.

He said the Falcon Heavy's success gave him more confidence in the BFR program's potential, and also had some symbolic meaning.

"It taught me crazy things can come true," he said. "I didn’t really think this would work."

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SpaceTeamGo.