SpaceX launching powerful Falcon Heavy rocket for 1st time in 18 months on April 27:
SpaceX’s brawny Falcon Heavy rocket is about to fly for the first time in a year and a half, and you can watch the action live.
Falcon Heavy employs three modified, strapped-together first stages of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. The central booster hosts an upper stage, which is integrated with the payload.
Together, these three boosters generate about 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, making Falcon Heavy the second-most-powerful launcher in operation today. The leader is NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket, which generates 8.8 million pounds. (SpaceX’s Starship creates a whopping 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, but it’s still in development.)
Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 with a test flight that launched SpaceX founder Elon Musk‘s cherry-red Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun. The rocket has since flown 10 more missions, every one of them successful.
But it’s been a while since Falcon Heavy breathed fire: It last launched in October 2024, sending NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft toward the Jupiter system.
ViaSat-3 F3 isn’t going nearly that far afield. The 6.6-ton (6 metric tons) satellite is headed to geostationary orbit (GEO) which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. At that altitude, orbital velocity matches our planet’s rotational speed, allowing satellites to “hover” over the same patch of real estate continuously.
ViaSat-3 F3’s patch is a big one: The satellite will provide high-throughput broadband service to customers throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
As its name suggests, ViaSat-3 F3 will be the third ViaSat-3 satellite to reach orbit. ViaSat-3 F1 did so atop a Falcon Heavy in April 2023, and ViaSat-3 F2 followed suit in November 2025 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V.
ViaSat-3 F1 currently provides service to customers aboard airliners, and ViaSat-3 F2 will serve people in the Americas when it comes online next month. ViaSat-3 F3 will round out the ViaSat-3 mini-constellation.
“This launch marks a pivotal moment in our journey to bring fast, secure and reliable high capacity, highly flexible broadband to our commercial, defense and consumer customers,” Dave Abrahamian, ViaSat’s vice president of space systems, said in a company statement earlier this month.
The Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters will come back for a landing at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station about eight minutes after launch on Monday, if all goes to plan. The central booster won’t be recovered; it will fall into the Atlantic Ocean when its work is done.
The Falcon Heavy’s upper stage, meanwhile, will carry ViaSat-3 F3 to geosynchronous transfer orbit, deploying it there about five hours after launch.