SpaceX Falcon Heavy poised for debut test launch, with Tesla Roadster payload

A scarlet Tesla Roadster from the assembly line of Elon Musk's pioneering electric automobile business is poised this week to go where no sports car has gone before - outer space.

    The sleek, battery-powered hot rod is serving as a mock payload for the highly anticipated debut test flight of Musk's new Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, set for liftoff as early as Tuesday (February 6) by his other transportation venture, Space Exploration Technologies.

    If the launch succeeds, the Falcon Heavy will rank as the most powerful rocket in operation today, and the mightiest space vehicle to blast off from the United States since NASA's Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.

    It would likely give California-based SpaceX a leg up on rival commercial rocket companies seeking major contracts with NASA, the U.S. military, satellite companies and even paying space tourists.

    Propelled by 27 engines supplying three times the thrust of SpaceX's current workhorse Falcon 9 booster, the Falcon Heavy is essentially constructed from three Falcon 9s bolted together side-by-side, with the nose cone and payload capping the middle rocket.

    The spacecraft is set for liftoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida - the same pad used by the Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11's three-man crew on their historic 1969 mission culminating in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first human steps on the lunar surface.

    The "passenger" riding atop the Falcon Heavy will be setting a more whimsical record as the first car sent into solar orbit - a deliberately droll bit of high-stakes, high-tech cross-promotion dreamed up by Musk himself.

    "I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future," the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder said in a Twitter post last month.