STS-135: The final shuttle launch

SpaceX is gearing up for the first commercial launch of its powerful Falcon Heavy rocket as soon as early April with a communications satellite for Arabsat, and the U.S. Air Force hopes the two side boosters from the Arabsat mission can be safely landed and reused for the military’s first Falcon Heavy mission this summer, an exercise officials said will help certify previously-flown hardware for future national security launches.

The world’s most powerful operational rocket flashed to life at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) Tuesday and climbed into a moonlit summer sky from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the same site where the Apollo 11 astronauts left Earth for their historic moon landing nearly 50 years ago.

New videos released Wednesday by SpaceX show the payload fairing from the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket plunging back into the atmosphere after launch June 25, trailing a wake of haunting blue super-heated plasma before unfurling a parafoil and landing in the net of an offshore recovery ship.