SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk recently announced on social media that his company was able to successfully fire all of the Falcon Heavy’s 27 Merlin 1D main engines during a hold-down test at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is the evolution of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and is essentially three of those cores strapped together, meaning a total of 27 engines generate a maximum thrust of 5.1 million pounds, equal to eighteens 747s. The Falcon Heavy, a reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle, is seen as the world's most powerful rocket since NASA's Saturn V.

It is a variant of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and consists of a strengthened Falcon 9 rocket core with two additional Falcon 9 first stages as strap-on boosters. Image copyright SPACEX Image caption Elon Musk's roadster is ready to head in the direction of Mars

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos For those who don’t know, the Falcon Heavy is based on SpaceX’s successful Falcon 9 rocket, a nine-engine machine that made SpaceX the first commercial space company to visit the International Space Station, when the Falcon 9 delivered SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to the ISS in 2012. Previously, Musk said that the rocket would carry a red Tesla Roadster and that the payload be injected into an orbit around the sun that lies between Earth's orbit and Mars' orbit, reports Xinhua. Image copyright SPACEX Image caption There are 27 engines at the base of the Falcon Heavy

The Falcon Heavy is essentially three of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 vehicles strapped together.
SpaceX conducts the first static fire test of the Falcon Heavy rocket ahead of its maiden flight with Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload.