SpaceX has launched Falcon Heavy, its most powerful rocket to date.
On Tuesday, the 23-story-high system ignited and blasted off from Launch Complex 39A in Florida, the same platform where the Apollo astronauts took off for the moon decades ago. Minutes later, two of the rocket boosters landed safely back on the ground.
This is the first time Elon Musk's private space company has tried to launch a rocket quite this big.
Falcon Heavy is re-usable, expandable, and cheaper than the competition. But Musk was careful to emphasize that this launch is still just a test.
"There's so much that could go wrong," Musk told reporters on Monday.
At least a couple things didn't go according to plan. Musk's Tesla Roadster and its dummy driver named Starman overshot their target to enter Mars orbit. And one rocket booster that was supposed to land atop a drone ship ended up barreling into the Atlantic Ocean and scattering shrapnel on the deck, Musk said.
Take a look at what happened when the massive experiment took off from the Kennedy Space Center:
SEE ALSO: We're on the ground at SpaceX's launch of its biggest and most powerful rocket — here's the latest
Falcon Heavy launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. SpaceX says it's the most powerful rocket in operation today "by a factor of two."
At 230 feet high, Falcon Heavy is as tall as a 23-story building.
The rocket system's engines are capable of generating more than 5 million pounds of thrust. "That's 4 million pounds of TNT equivalent," Musk said on Monday.
Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket the US has seen since the Saturn V moon missions took off in the 1970s.
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