Is there life on Mars? I don’t know, I missed the turn-off...
side-by-side at Cape Canaveral Florida, touching down in unison.
Other than missing its intended target, the only other minor blemish on the mission was that the centre booster, which was to set down on a floating platform in the Atlantic, slammed into the water instead.
Some of the engines had failed to ignite for the final landing burn.
By that point, Heavy’s payload was well on its way through Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt.
About seven hours after take off, Musk announced a final burn was due to push his sports car away from Earth and on a huge orbit around the Sun, taking it close to Mars.
In the history of space exploration it was a giant leap for mankind.
As all three boosters are designed to be recovered to fly again, a Falcon Heavy launch costs not much more than one by the firm’s existing rocket.
Spacex lists a price of €73million for in a Falcon Heavy flight, compared with €51million for Falcon 9 – a bargain in the context of space flight.
As a result, the order book is bristling. Flights for Arabsat, a Saudi Arabian communications company, and the United States Air Force are already in place.
Musk said: “I can imagine large numbers of those, just coming in and Dashboard says ‘Don’t panic’ landing, taking off, landing, doing many flights per day. I think it gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture, our interplanetary spaceship.”
That spaceship, known as the BFR – Big Falcon Rocket or, as some call it, Big F ****** Rocket – could start going into short-hop flight tests next year.
Those missions could take place at a space complex that NASA is building near Brownsville, Texas. “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it’s cool,” Musk joked.
Within three or four years, the BFR spaceship could start making trips in low Earth orbit and within a decade or so, they hope it might offer a regular passenger service to Mars.
Musk added: “Falcon Heavy opens up a new class of payload.
“It can launch more than twice as much payload as any other rocket, so it’s kind of up to customers what they might want to launch.
“It can launch things directly to Pluto and beyond.
“It can launch giant satellites, it can do anything you want. You could send people back to the Moon.”
Musk noted that putting two or three Falcon Heavy missions together would equal the capability of the Apollo era’s Saturn V rocket, which is still the most powerful ever built.
“But I wouldn’t recommend doing that because I think the new architecture, the BFR architecture, is the way to go,” Musk added.
He now hopes the success of Falcon Heavy and the rise of the BFR could spark more innovation elsewhere in the space industry.
“I think it’s going to encourage other countries and companies to raise their sights and say, ‘Hey, we can do bigger and better’,” he declared.
“Which is great. We want a new space race. Races are exciting.”
Professor Jim Bell, a space exploration expert from Arizona State University, said Spacex could make humanity a “multi-planet species”.
He added: “They’re not in it for tourism, they’re in it for colonisation.
“Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin – these other companies launching suborbital spacecraft and eventually, orbital spacecraft – they have a clear tourist component.”