On February 6, 2018, at 20:45 UTC, the Falcon Heavy took off for the first time at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, from Pad 39A. On this mission, "Falcon Heavy Test flight", SpaceX decided to use Elon Musk's car (a 2008 Tesla Roadster) as a dummy payload. This payload also included, below it, a plaque of the current SpaceX employees, as well as camera mounts to stream a live feed of the car on youtube.
The Dragon spacecraft is a cargo capsule designed to be filled with equipment and supplies for the astronauts on the ISS. The capsule is put on the Falcon 9 rocket (because the Dragon does not have big enough rockets to fly to space on its own) and flown into orbit. From orbit it separates from the boosters, then the capsule uses its own smaller rockets to get to the ISS. Then the capsule is filled up with old equipment, the results of scientific experiments, and garbage. It then reenters the Earth's atmosphere and parachutes into the ocean. The first flight of Dragon was in June 2010. The last flight was on 6 March 2020, with Dragon 2 scheduled for all future missions.
On May 29, 2014, SpaceX unveiled a prototype version of Dragon V2, which could hold both cargo and astronauts. Another feature that this upgraded version of Dragon, to protect the life of crew in the event of a failure of Falcon 9, it was fitted with SuperDraco thrusters, which would push the capsule away from the rocket. Cargo Dragon, a variant of V2, will replace the current version of dragon that can only hold cargo.
Since SpaceX started in 2002, the company has created three types of rocket engines — Merlin and the retired Kestrel for launch vehicle propulsion, and the Draco control thrusters. SpaceX is currently working on two further rocket engines: SuperDraco and Raptor. Merlin is a family of rocket engines made by SpaceX for use on their rockets. The Merlin engine was originally designed for sea recovery and reuse. Kestrel is a Liquid Oxygen/Rocket fuel pressure-fed rocket engine and was used as the Falcon 1 rocket's second stage main engine. Both names for the Merlin and Kestrel engines come from species of North American falcons: the kestrel and the merlin.
Draco are hypergolic liquid-propellant rocket engines that utilize monomethyl hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. Each Draco thruster creates of thrust. They are used as reaction control system (RCS) thrusters on the Dragon spacecraft. SuperDraco engines are a much more powerful version of the Draco thrusters, which were initially meant to be used as landing and a way to get the capsule away in an emergency on the version 2 Dragon spacecraft, Dragon 2. The concept of using these SuperDraco engines for landing was canceled in 2017 when it was decided to perform a traditional parachute descent and landing in the sea.
Raptor is a new family of methane-fueled engines to be used in its future Starship rockets. Testing versions were test fired in late 2016. On April 3, 2019, SpaceX conducted a successful test in which the engine was started but the rocket was held down in Texas on its Starhopper vehicle, which ignited the engine while the vehicle remained attached to the ground. On July 24, 2019 SpaceX conducted a successful test flight of 20 meters up of its Starhopper test vehicle. On the 28th August 2019 SpaceX's Starhopper prototype conducted a successful test flight of 150-meters.
SpaceX's secondary mission is to reuse rockets, similarly to a plane. It first began to test reusability with a prototype called Grasshopper in 2012, as well as controlled soft landings into the water during Falcon 9 launches. In 2014, Grasshopper was replaced by F9R, which was an upgraded version of grasshopper included retractable landing gear and 3 engines, compared to Grasshopper's single engine. Falcon 9 was landed in December on a ground pad, followed by a landing on a drone ship the next year. Currently, SpaceX has landed successfully 48 boosters. Dragon capsules, as well as farings, are also being reused. Reusing parts of rockets greatly reduce costs.
In January 2015, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the development of a new satellite constellation to provide internet service to the world. In June 2015 the company asked the federal government for permission to begin testing for a project that aims to build a web of 4,425 satellites capable of beaming the Internet to the entire globe, including remote regions which currently do not have Internet access. The Internet service would use 4,425 cross-linked communications satellites in 1,100 km orbits. It started to be made in 2015, and testing satellites were launched on the SpaceX PAZ mission in 2017. Initial operation of the constellation could begin as early as 2020. SpaceX filed with the US regulatory authorities plans to field a constellation of an additional 7,518 satellites in non-geosynchronous orbits to provide communications services" in an Called the "V-band low-Earth-orbit (VLEO) constellation", it would consist of "7,518 satellites to follow the [earlier] proposed 4,425 satellites that would function in Ka-band and Ku-band".
In February 2019, SpaceX formed a sibling company, SpaceX Services, Inc., to license the creation and launch of up to 1,000,000 fixed satellite earth stations that will communicate with its Starlink system. In May 2019, SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites aboard a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, FL.
SpaceX is creating a super-heavy lift rocket, Starship. Starship is a rocket with two parts that can be used over and over again. It is planned to replace all of the company's existing rockets by the early 2020s.
SpaceX initially envisioned a 12-meter-diameter Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) concept in 2016 which was only planned for Mars travel and other interplanetary uses. In 2017, SpaceX designed a smaller 9-meter-diameter "Big Falcon Rocket" to replace all of SpaceX launch capabilities— Earth-orbit, lunar-orbit, interplanetary missions, and potentially, even earth transit—but do so on a fully reusable set of vehicles with a lower cost structure. A large portion of the components on Starship are made of 301 stainless steel. Private passenger Yusaku Maezawa has contracted to fly around the Moon in Starship in 2023.
Musk's long term vision for the company is the creation of technology and means suitable for human colonization on Mars. He has expressed his interest in someday traveling to the planet, stating "I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact." A rocket every two years or so could provide a base for the people arriving in 2025 after a launch in 2024. According to Steve Jurvetson, Musk believes that by 2035 at the latest, there will be thousands of rockets flying a million people to Mars, in order to enable a self-sustaining human colony.
In 2006, NASA said that SpaceX had won a NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Phase 1 contract to s show cargo delivery to the ISS, with a possible contract option for crew flight. This contract, designed by NASA to provide "seed money" through Space Act Agreements for developing new space opportunities, NASA paid SpaceX $396 million to work on the cargo configuration of the Dragon spacecraft, while SpaceX spent more than $500 million to develop the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. These Space Act Agreements have been shown to have saved NASA millions of dollars in development costs, making rocket development ~4-10 times cheaper than if produced by NASA alone.
In December 2010, the launch of the COTS Demo Flight 1 mission, SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft. Dragon was successfully put into orbit, circled the Earth twice, and then made a controlled burn for a water landing in the Pacific Ocean. With Dragon's safe recovery, SpaceX became the first private company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft; prior to this mission, only government agencies had been able to recover orbital spacecraft.