Falcon Heavy maiden flight

On 6 February 2018, Falcon Heavy thundered off Launch Complex 39A — the same pad that sent Apollo to the Moon — to become the most powerful operational rocket in the world, roughly doubling the payload capacity of the next-closest vehicle.

In a moment that captured global attention, the two side boosters returned and landed simultaneously, side by side, back at the Cape. The payload was pure Musk theatre: his own midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster with a spacesuited mannequin named "Starman" at the wheel, dispatched on a trajectory past the orbit of Mars.

Beyond the spectacle, Falcon Heavy gave the US a heavy-lift commercial rocket capable of national-security and deep-space missions at a fraction of the cost of expendable rivals. It demonstrated that reusability could scale up to the largest, most demanding launches.