SpaceX launched its mega Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in more than three years Tuesday, hoisting satellites for the military and then nailing side-by-side booster landings back near the pad.

Thick fog shrouded NASA's Kennedy Space Center as the rocket blasted off at midmorning. The crowd at the launch site couldn't even see the pad three miles (5 kilometers) away, but heard the roar of the 27 first-stage engines.

Both side boosters peeled away two minutes after liftoff, flew back to Cape Canaveral, and landed alongside one another, just a few seconds apart. The core stage was discarded at sea, its entire energy needed to get the Space Force's satellites to their intended extra-high orbit.

A high-altitude scientific balloon containing 1.2-ton payloads was lifted into the sky and reached an altitude of 30km in a demonstration test that helped validate the payload capacity of a near-space balloon platform.

The flight test was conducted in northwestern China's Qinghai Province on September 30, 2022, by a research team from the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), marking a further step in the development of China's high-altitude balloon platform.

Delivering payloads from the ground to the stratospheric region known as "near-space," the balloon platform can carry tons of scientific instruments, especially large-sized ones such as unmanned air vehicles over aerial-based launches.