Space Exploration Technology rolled out Tuesday the biggest rocket  called Falcon Heavy since man made its first landing on the moon. If the plan pushes through, the initial liftoff will be on 2013 from California with the succeeding launches from Cape Canaveral.

The company had already sent its first private rocket into orbit as a commercial venture. The spacecraft will be designed to carry a load that is two times greater than the cargo that can be loaded into the shuttle. Falcon Heavy is huge enough to carry cargo or crew to the moon, an asteroid, or Mars. Only the long decommissioned Saturn V rocket was bigger.

With the ability to carry payload as much as 117,000 pounds into a similar orbit as the International Space Station, Space X President Elon Musk said the Falcon Heavy is a huge scale rocket. The space shuttle can carry a load of 54,000 pounds while the Saturn V can load over 400,000 pounds.

Although the Soviet Union had a moon rocket bigger than the Falcon Heavy, it was not able to launch in all four tries. It also built another huge rocket but it was only able to launch once over two decades ago. Initially designed to carry cargo, the Falcon Heavy complies with NASA’s safety requirements for carrying crew.

Musk said that if NASA opts to fly its crew on commercial rockets, his company can launch people in the much smaller Falcon 9 and Dragon in the next three years. Aside from NASA, other possible customers for the Falcon Heavy are the military, foreign governments, and satellite manufacturers.

The Falcon Heavy is more economical than government or private rockets. Individual launches are worth $100 million. Musk revealed that the US Air Force pays two aerospace firms around $435 million per launch. After four decades, the shuttle program spent around $1.5 billion for every launch, revealed by a study by the University of Colorado and an analysis of Associated Press of NASA budgets.

If Space Exploration Technology does succeed, it will give the Obama administration’s space program a needed boost. The government has been battling for the use of private space companies for sending crew into orbit with NASA focusing on missions to new places such as asteroids. At present, Russia is being paid by NASA to send astronauts on back and forth trips to the International Space Station onboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

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