It was on this day, April 11, 2019, when Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the first paid mission for its Falcon heavy program. That massive rocket took off at about 6:35 p.m. local time from NASA’s Kennedy Space Station in Florida, carrying a satellite for Saudi Arabia’s Arabsat. More impressively, though, while SpaceX then recovered all three of the rocket’s boosters with two simultaneously returning to land and the third on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. It was a feat the Falcon Heavy had failed to pull off before, particularly a year earlier, during a demonstration flight that turned into a spectacle with that test payload that included that cherry red Tesla roadster with a mannequin in the front seat. We got a good laugh out of that, but ultimately, SpaceX had the last laugh. It’s been launching commercial missions prior to that, but it was with a smaller rocket, the Falcon nine.
