A triple-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the company’s most powerful operational rocket, blasted off from Florida Wednesday, boosting a ViaSat internet satellite into space, the company’s third in a globe-spanning fleet of high-speed broadband relay stations.
Along with putting the ViaSat-3 satellite into its planned preliminary orbit, the rocket’s two side boosters, heralded by competing sonic booms, executed on-target touchdowns on separate pads at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after boosting the vehicle out of the dense lower atmosphere.
William Harwood/CBS News
It was the 12th flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket since the booster’s maiden launch in 2018 and the first since October 2024 when SpaceX sent NASA’s Europa probe on the way to Jupiter. As expected, the heavy-lift rocket once again put on a spectacular show for area residents and tourists along Florida’s Space Coast.
Powered by 27 Merlin engines in three strapped-together Falcon 9 first stage boosters, the Falcon Heavy roared to life at 10:13 a.m. EDT and majestically climbed away from historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
Two minutes and 25 seconds after liftoff, the Heavy’s two side boosters, both veterans of earlier flights, peeled away and headed back to the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for landing while the central core stage continued the climb to space.
A minute-and-a-half later, the core stage, making its first and only flight, fell away and the rocket’s upper stage took over. Unlike the side boosters, which had propellant reserves for landing, the core stage burned all of its fuel as planned and was then jettisoned to crash into the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX webcast 
Three upper stage engine firings were required to put the ViaSat-3 Flight 3 broadband satellite in an elliptical orbit that will allow the relay station’s on-board propulsion to put the craft in a circular “geosynchronous” orbit 22,300 miles above the equator.
SpaceX is actively building a constellation of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit that provide internet access by routing data from users to satellites passing overhead, which in turn relay the signals to and from ground stations. So far, the company has launched nearly 12,000 Starlinks in nearly 400 launches over the past seven years.
Blue Origin also is building a planned constellation of some 3,200 broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit, with 270 launched to date. Amazon’s LEO satellites eventually will compete head to head with SpaceX’s Starlinks.
ViaSat is taking a different approach, stationing larger, much more powerful and sophisticated satellites in geosynchronous orbit where they rotate in lockstep with the planet below and thus appear stationary in the sky, providing global space-based internet access on hemispheric scales.
The powerful satellites are equipped with huge solar panels generating 25 kilowatts of power and stretching 144 feet from tip to tip when fully unfolded.
ViaSat 
Capable of handling up to 1 terabyte of data per second, the satellites are equipped with the largest dish antenna ever launched on a commercial satellite. Once on station, the huge reflector will unfold atop an 80- to 90-foot-long telescoping boom based on technology developed for the James Webb Space Telescope.
California-based ViaSat built the relay station’s communications equipment while Boeing supplied the satellite that carries it. A division of Northrop Grumman built the deployable reflector.
The first ViaSat-3 satellite was launched in May 2023, but the antenna did not deploy properly and the spacecraft reportedly could only achieve about 10 percent of its 1-terabyte capability. A second ViaSat-3 satellite was launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket last November to provide service across the Americas.
If all goes well, the latest ViaSat-3 will provide internet access to customers across Asia and the Pacific Ocean region. The first ViaSat will be moved to an orbital location enabling limited coverage of Europe and Africa.
“It’s kind of the end of an era. We’ve been working this program for over 10 years now,” Dave Abrahamian, ViaSat’s vice president of Satellite Systems, told Spaceflight Now. “So that’s a good chunk of life that’s gone by over the course of the program.
“It’s a different world now than when we started the program. Back then, we had a handful of satellites in orbit. Since then, we’ve launched the two ViaSat-3s, we merged with Inmarsat, we’ve got the third one ready to go now. So totally different world, different feeling, and its pretty cool to have been part of it all.”