In Photos: SpaceX's 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket Readies for Launch

SpaceX plans to launch its huge new Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time on Feb. 6, 2018. It is the most powerful U.S. rocket since NASA’s might Saturn V! See photos of the powerful booster and its unusual payload – SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster electric car, here. This Image: The Falcon Heavy rocket stands at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Dec. 28, 2017.

The Falcon Heavy’s first stage is essentially three Falcon 9 rocket cores strapped together — meaning the big booster will have 27 Merlin engines firing in unison at liftoff.

Here’s a closer look at the engines of the Falcon Heavy, which Elon Musk Tweeted out in December.

A peek inside the Falcon Heavy’s payload fairing reveals a red Tesla Roadster — a vehicle built by Musk’s electric-car company.

The Falcon Heavy will generate more than 5 million lbs. of thrust at liftoff, making it twice as powerful as any other booster operating today, SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has said.

The Heavy’s upper stage is similar to that of a Falcon 9, powered by a single Merlin engine.

“Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring,” Musk wrote on Instagram in December 2017. “Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing ‘Space Oddity,’ on a billion-year elliptic Mars orbit.”

The Roadster’s color is a nod to Mars, which the car will approach at times during its long loop around the sun. The car won’t actually land or, or orbit, the Red Planet, however.

Mars has long been in SpaceX’s sights. Musk aims to help establish a million-person city on the Red Planet in the next half-century or so, using a rocket-spaceship combo called the BFR — the next-generation heavy-lifter after Falcon Heavy.

The Roadster gives some perspective, showing how big the Heavy’s payload fairing is.

Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster isn’t the first weird payload to launch on a SpaceX rocket’s debut flight. The first Falcon 9 launch carried, of all things, a wheel of cheese into space.

The maiden flights of new rockets don’t always go well, and Musk has said there’s a good chance the Falcon Heavy won’t survive its upcoming liftoff. “I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest,” he said at a conference last July. 

SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket, a massive heavy-lift launch vehicle, is seen during assembly ahead of its first test flight from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket’s first flight is expected in January 2018.

SpaceX performed the first static-fire test of a Falcon Heavy rocket core at the company’s Texas test facility in early May 2017.

The Falcon Heavy was designed to be reusable. Both the center core and the side boosters carry landing legs, which will land each core on Earth after takeoff.

Booster basics: The Falcon Heavy’s Octaweb clustering of Merlin engines.