"It seems surreal to me," said Elon Musk, proprietor of SpaceX, and for once he was understating things. On Tuesday, his company blasted a 230-foot rocket into orbit, returned its two side boosters to Earth for a flawlessly synchronized landing and -- with exquisite nerdy flair -- propelled Musk's own Tesla Roadster toward deep space, where it's expected to orbit the sun for hundreds of millions of years. Surreal, yes. But it was also a triumph of private enterprise and a milestone in American spacefaring. Its true significance, in fact, may not be apparent for decades.

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Known as the Falcon Heavy, the new projectile has 27 engines generating 5 million pounds of thrust, making it the most powerful rocket ever built by a private company. It'll soon face competition. Musk's rival space-billionaire, Jeff Bezos, is also building a new heavy-lift rocket, and so is United Launch Alliance, an aerospace joint venture. SpaceX is already at work on its next generation, the BFR, which it expects will one day transport people to Mars. The U.S. government, incongruously, is building its own behemoth, the Space Launch System, at a cost of some $23 billion and counting.

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Skeptics accurately note that this rivalry is heating up just as commercial demand for such firepower is dwindling. Satellites are getting smaller and lighter, while improvements in engine technology mean that smaller rockets -- such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 -- can handle bigger payloads. Customers may be hard to come by for the Falcon Heavy.

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This misses the bigger picture, however. Competition in the space business -- worth some $323 billion annually -- is driving down costs and stimulating both innovation and demand. By mastering reusable rocketry, SpaceX has substantially reduced the expense of getting stuff into orbit, to the benefit of everything from navigation systems to data transmission. At $90 million per launch, the Falcon Heavy will be able to carry twice the payload of its nearest competitor for about one-fifth the cost. In the near term, this should enable some cheaper military launches, and might also allow NASA to conduct more frequent research missions into deep space. Conceivably, the Falcon Heavy could even transport people to the moon, at a fraction of the expected cost of an SLS launch.

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But longer-term, and more intriguingly, the new rocket could open up novel commercial possibilities. Companies are already testing gear for asteroid mining, space tourism, moon expeditions and much else, spurred on in no small part by SpaceX's earlier achievements. Add cheap, reliable heavy-lift rockets to the equation and the opportunities only expand. A few decades from now, more far-out stuff -- space-based energy production, say -- may no longer be science fiction. Even if the Falcon Heavy becomes obsolete, in other words, it will represent an important landmark in the grand American space experiment.

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This Saturday Musk is planning another launch, just as exciting, but it will have a much faster and prevalent effect on the everyday person. Back in 2015, SpaceX announced one of its more ambitious proposals: a constellation of satellites in orbit around the Earth, providing internet access to everyone and everywhere. Their plan involved launching over 4,000 such satellites, which would form a network capable of transmitting anywhere.

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Since the initial public announcement in early 2015, there have been a few pieces of news, such as an FCC filing in late 2016 and a proposal to start launching satellites in 2019. Now, it appears that SpaceX is ahead of schedule, as it’s planning to launch the first of its test satellites on Saturday. While satellite internet does currently exist, SpaceX’s plan is a bit different.

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Internet satellites today fly at geostationary orbits, over 20,000 miles above the Earth. SpaceX wants to put their satellites much closer, at around 750 miles, only three times further than the ISS. With closer satellites, connection speeds will be much faster and bandwidth will be higher.

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The downside to closer satellites, though, is that SpaceX is going to need a lot more of them. It only takes a handful of satellites parked in geostationary orbit to reach the whole world, but SpaceX is going to need a few thousand. Even a few years ago, such a feat would have been impossible, but with the recent successful launch of the Falcon Heavy and the advent of reusable spacecraft, putting 4,000 satellites in orbit might just be doable.

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In fact, SpaceX is not the only company with a plan for a global internet network. Boeing, Samsung, OneWeb, and others all have plans to launch their own satellite constellation over the next few years. SpaceX might beat them all, though, simply because it also owns the rockets necessary to get those satellites into space and is already beginning to launch them.

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The launch this Saturday will put two test satellites, Microsat 2a and 2b, into orbit. These satellites will test connections with ground stations in Washington, California, and Texas, plus receivers in mobile vans scattered around the country.

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If these tests go well, SpaceX could begin launching the first of its satellites later this year, with a functional, if limited, network in place by 2020. This initial network would include about 800 satellites and cover the United States. The company would then begin expanding coverage to the rest of the world. Once again, SpaceX has tried something unreasonable -- surreal, even -- and once again, it has prevailed.