Updated at 4:46 p.m. ET
The world's newest, most powerful rocket in decades has reached space. It took a few weather delays Tuesday, but the private space company SpaceX has successfully launched its Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center.
(If you'd like to skip ahead to the very moment the rocket lifts off, you can find it about 29:50 into the video.)
Not long after the massive craft blasted off NASA's historic Launch Pad 39A, arcing a fiery path through the sky, its side boosters fell away. As the main rocket continued its journey into space, two of the boosters returned to Earth, landing successfully back on their designated pads.
The center booster broke away from the rocket, as well, though it remains unclear whether that landed successfully on a drone ship at sea, as planned.
"SpaceX lands its rockets so it can reuse them again," NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports. "That's how it's trying to make space flight cheaper."
Falcon Heavy is yet the latest example of that quest to make it much cheaper to get things into orbit. According to the company, it will cost just $90 million per launch, a fraction of the price of similar heavy-lift rockets.
Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder, has said the ultimate goal is to make humans an interplanetary species, by creating a colony on Mars.
Falcon Heavy is a small step on that journey but it is still a very large machine. Weighing in at over 1,500 tons, it can carry more stuff into space than any vehicle since the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo Era.
On board this flight is a car made by one of Musk's other companies, Tesla. The cherry red roadster — complete with a mannequin wearing a spacesuit, naturally — is heading into an elliptical Earth-Mars orbit. At a press conference Monday, Musk said three cameras mounted to the car should provide "epic views."
"It's just for fun — he didn't want it to be boring," Nell notes. "Usually on a test flight, you put something on it, and so he figured, why not a car from his other company?"
Nell explained more about the rocket inher preview of the launch here. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org/.