SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, the world's most-powerful active rocket, lifted off for the first time in more than three years on Tuesday from Florida's Cape Canaveral, with Elon Musk's company sending a group of satellites into orbit for the U.S. Space Force.
The rocket system, consisting of three Falcon 9 boosters strapped side-by-side, took off from a SpaceX launch pad, with two satellites from the Space Force and a group of smaller satellites bound for orbit. The Space Force did not provide details of its satellites and requested that SpaceX end its launch live stream early without showing their deployment.
Tuesday's mission marked the first use of the rocket by the Space Force, a U.S. military branch established under former President Donald Trump to oversee much of the Pentagon's defense activities in space. Minutes later, the pair of boosters, each some five stories tall, reignited their engines and landed almost simultaneously on adjacent concrete slabs, drawing roaring applause from engineers inside SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a company live stream showed.
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