Yeah, you read that title right. On Tuesday, February 6th, 2018, Elon Musk successfully launched a car into space.
In 2011, Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, proposed the idea of the Falcon Heavy, which, if successful, would be the most powerful operational rocket on the planet. 7 years later it was finally ready to take off into space.
So why the car? It was more of a publicity stunt than anything. The launch of the Falcon Heavy on February 6th was a test run. According to Musk, the engineering of this rocket was harder than anticipated, so the company wanted to make sure that it would hit its desired orbit before putting anything too valuable on board. Instead, Musk decided to put a cherry red Tesla roadster on board, complete with a dummy driver named Starman in a SpaceX spacesuit and David Bowie’s Space Oddity on repeat. Musk is also the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Inc, and the four hour livestream of the cars first trip to space could be seen as a major Tesla advertisement.
The roadster was supposed to enter a similar orbit to Mars around the Sun, but it overshot and entered the Asteroid Belt. However, the successful launch of the Falcon Heavy promises a very bright future to space travel. The Falcon Heavy is a large enough rocket to carry satellites into space, which is likely what it will do, and it is just the precursor to a rocket being worked on by SpaceX designed to land on Mars. Even though launching a car into space was just a silly stunt, the overall mission, coming 7 years after NASA closed their space shuttle program, may have reignited to energy to explore deep space.
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