Mid-morning on January 6, earlier this week the Heavy Falcon, SpaceX’s most powerful rocket, launched from Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A. On top of being a rocket significant for its power, it also has a special passenger on board; CEO Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster which is the home of a spacesuit dummy.

Musk has high expectations for the vehicle’s trip and believes it will open doors for the future of commercial space travel.

“If all goes as planned, the Falcon Heavy and its unusual cargo will be orbiting for a billion years,” said Musk in an interview with ABC News. “It can do anything you want, including sending people to the moon and launching things to Pluto.”

Amongst the expansive number of onlookers was our very own President Donald Trump who, per usual, took to twitter to voice his positive opinion on the subject. President Trump and Musk have had an on and off relationship as of late but that didn’t stop the President from congratulating SpaceX on their accomplishment.

“Congratulations @ElonMusk and @SpaceX on the successful #FalconHeavy launch.” tweeted Trump on February 7. “This achievement, along with @NASA’s commercial and international partners, continues to show American ingenuity at its best!”

Although SPaceX did accomplish a historic feat, they also miscalculated the trajectory of the rocket due to an underestimation of the projectile’s capability. This caused the Heavy Falcon to miss the orbit of Mars, as was the original intention, and soared right past the planet and is headed towards an asteroid belt more than 300 million miles from Earth.

Blanchet students showed feelings of interest and skepticism towards the launch. Some students shared SpaceX’s outlook that it was a ‘just for fun’ journey while others questioned the plan for the Tesla Roadster post-launch.

“I think space exploration is a crucial component of science and could be essential to our future,” said senior Carter Custer. “SpaceX is helping our country make advancements in space travel and I have a lot of appreciation for that.”

On the contrary, individuals felt that it was just creating ‘space junk’ and wasn’t necessarily accomplishing anything productive with its extensive use of resources.

“Although it is intriguing, I believe more could have been accomplished with such a capable rocket.” said sophomore Matt Martin. “It seems that it would’ve been much more productive to take the project a more research intensive orientated direction.”

Revitalizing the nation’s interest in space exploration, SpaceX somewhat accomplished what their mission and directed the attention of the nation towards their interests achieving a historically powerful launch all while brilliantly advertising the cherry-red Tesla Roadster. At the very least, the launch was marketing genius for CEO Elon Musk.