SpaceX has hit a rocket straight out of the park on the first test flight of its big new rocket.
The Falcon Heavy rocket blasted off Tuesday afternoon from the same Florida launch pad used by NASA nearly 50 years ago to send men to the moon.
With liftoff, the Heavy became the most powerful rocket in use today. Its three boosters and 27 engines roared to life at Kennedy Space Center.
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Not only did the rocket lift a red sports car into orbit -- with a dummy "Starman" at the wheel -- two of the three boosters came back and landed upright at Cape Canaveral.
The 15-story boosters landed at the same time, side by side.
There was no immediate word on whether the center booster managed to touch down on a floating platform 300 miles offshore.
Here are the main things to know about the Falcon Heavy liftoff:
It is essentially three rockets bolted together to make the heavy vehicle.
It is a test flight.
The middle booster will carry Elon Musk's own Red Tesla Roadster.
The Roadster is planned be near Mars' orbit in a precision Earth Mars elliptical orbit around the sun.
The mission will try to prove that it is possible to put payloads into an orbit intersecting Mars. This would help in the mission planned to put humans in Mars.
Musk presented this project in 2011 and he planned to roll out the heavy rocket in Southern California in late 2012. He hoped for a launch at some point in 2013 -- it was obviously delayed.
The rockets were put in position in pad 39A and tested in December 2017.
Falcon Heavy rockets cost a fraction of the price of the future Space Launch System rockets, which are planned to have more lift and throw a spacecraft further into space, to Jupiter and beyond. They will probably not be ready until the mid-2020s.
Each rocket has nine engines, making it 27 engines in total that need to ignite in tandem.
The two side rockets will jettison from the center rocket two and a half minutes after liftoff.
The center booster will continue for a bit longer before engines are shut off.
All three rockets are planned to land back on Earth; two back at the Cape and the heavier rocket at the Atlantic (barge) platform called "Of course, I still love you."
There is a good chance that this launch may fail.
Falcon Heavy weighs more than 3.1 million pounds (loaded with kerosene and liquid oxygen) and it's about 229 feet tall.
If successful, there will be more heavy launches during the first half of 2018 from Cape Canaveral, too.
Central Florida residents, especially those near the coast -- but as far away as metro Orlando -- may hear a sonic boom.