THE world’s most powerful rocket, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, blasted off Tuesday on its highly anticipated maiden test flight, carrying CEO Elon Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster toward an orbit near Mars.

Screams and cheers erupted at mission control in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the United States, as the massive rocket fired its 27 engines and rumbled into the blue sky over the same NASA launchpad that served as a base for the U.S. missions to the Moon four decades ago.

“The mission went as well as one could have hoped,” an ecstatic Musk told reporters after the launch, calling it “probably the most exciting thing I have seen literally ever.”

Loaded with Musk’s red Tesla and a mannequin in a spacesuit, the monster rocket’s historic test voyage captured the world’s imagination.

If the Roadster survives its five-hour journey through the Van Allen Belt — a region of high radiation where it will be pelted with charged particles — it will attempt a final burn toward Mars, Musk said.

Then, the car would enter an orbit around the Sun that brings it close to Mars, on a journey that could last a billion years and take it as far as 400 million kilometers from Earth, the same as a trip around the equator 10,000 times. The Roadster was also outfitted with a data storage unit containing Isaac Asimov’s science fiction book series, the Foundation Trilogy, and a plaque bearing the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees.

The Falcon Heavy launched from the same NASA pad that was the base for the Apollo-era Moon missions of the 1960s and 1970s. It is “the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two,” SpaceX said.

That means it can carry twice the payload of United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, at a far lower cost — about US$90 million per launch compared to US$350 million for its competitor.

But the Falcon Heavy is not the most powerful rocket ever — just the biggest in operation today.

The Saturn V rocket that propelled astronauts to the Moon could deliver more payload to orbit. The Soviet-era Energia, which flew twice in 1987 and 1988, was also more powerful.

(SD-Agencies)