Elon Musk's Victory Lap
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—You had to see it to believe it, and even then, you weren’t quite sure it really happened. The successful launch of the Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket, stunned spectators on Tuesday—including the man who invented it.
“It seems surreal to me,” Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, said Tuesday night, a few hours after the flight. “I had this image of just a giant explosion on the pad.”
Instead, SpaceX made history. The Falcon Heavy now joins the club historically reserved for the U.S. government, not commercial companies run by quirky billionaires who sell and so they can dig long-running tunnels in the ground. At about 3:45 p.m. ET on Tuesday, 15 minutes before the day’s’s Space Shuttle flights, which took off from the very same launchpad.
