SpaceX's Falcon Heavy returns to flight after 18 months with ViaSat-3 F3

SpaceX is set to launch Falcon Heavy on Monday, April 27, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a liftoff window opening at 10:21 a.m. ET and lasting 85 minutes. It's the rocket's 12th flight and first since October 2024, when it carried NASA's Europa Clipper toward Jupiter. The payload this time is ViaSat-3 F3, a 6.6-ton Ka-band communications satellite destined for geostationary orbit roughly 22,000 miles above Earth.

The mission

ViaSat-3 F3 is built to deliver high-speed broadband across the Asia-Pacific region, with a claimed throughput capacity of 1 Tbps. Viasat targets aviation, maritime, government, and defense customers — think in-flight Wi-Fi on long-haul routes and connectivity for ships at sea. According to the Viasat official announcement, the satellite is expected to enter service in late summer 2026, completing Viasat's planned three-satellite global constellation covering the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.

The mission has some background pressure behind it. Viasat's first ViaSat-3 satellite, launched in 2023, suffered an antenna deployment failure and now operates at less than 10% of its intended capacity — a disaster that triggered a $421 million insurance claim. F3 is critical to the constellation actually delivering on its original promise.

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The rocket

Falcon Heavy generates around 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, making it one of the most powerful operational rockets in the world. It's built from three modified Falcon 9 first-stage boosters strapped together. For this flight, both side boosters will perform synchronized return-to-launch-site landings at LZ-2 and LZ-40 — a crowd-pleasing double touchdown that SpaceX has made routine. The center core, carrying the heavy geosynchronous transfer orbit load, will be expended rather than recovered.

The wider picture

F3 was originally booked on Ariane 6, Europe's next-generation heavy-lift rocket. But persistent delays to Ariane 6's development — compounded by a backlog caused by redirecting Russian Soyuz payloads after the Ukraine invasion — forced Viasat to switch to Falcon Heavy in 2023, per NASASpaceflight's technical analysis. That contract loss is another signal of SpaceX's dominance in commercial heavy-lift at a time when Blue Origin's New Glenn is just beginning to challenge it from the same Florida coast. The Space.com launch preview confirms all launch details ahead of Monday's window.