Falcon Heavy

The idea of a "heavy" Falcon made of three cores appeared as early as 2003, when a version using three Falcon 1 boosters with an approximate payload capacity of two tons to low Earth orbit was discussed. By 2005 the concept had moved to the then still-unflown Falcon 9 under the name Falcon 9 Heavy. SpaceX unveiled the Falcon Heavy plan publicly at a Washington, D.C. news conference in April 2011, with an initial test flight expected in 2013.

Several factors pushed the debut to 2018: two anomalies with Falcon 9 vehicles forced all engineering resources onto failure analysis and halted flight operations for months, and the structural challenge of combining three Falcon 9 cores proved far harder than expected. In July 2017 Elon Musk said as much: "It actually ended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought. ... We were pretty naive about that".

The maiden flight lifted off on February 6, 2018 at 20:45 UTC. The second Falcon Heavy flew on April 11, 2019 and all three boosters returned successfully to Earth; the third followed on June 25, 2019. The vehicle has since been certified for the U.S. National Security Space Launch programme. Notable payloads include Arabsat-6A, Boeing's X-37B, EchoStar XXIV, the Europa Clipper probe, the GOES-19 weather satellite, the Psyche mission and ViaSat-3. It operates from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, with SLC-6 at Vandenberg planned as a second pad. List price was US$97 million in reusable configuration (2022) and US$150 million expendable (2017).