Did you know there is a Tesla car in space right now, you might be thinking why, because Elon Musk wanted to be. Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, which is well-known for its electric car manufacturing company, and he is also the CEO and the founder of SpaceX company which is working on the super-heavy rocket called Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a reusable heavy launch vehicle or in common terms, a reusable space rocket with a huge payload manufactured and designed by SpaceX and is now the most powerful rocket.
Falcon now provides the U.S. with a heavy lift space rocket not seen since the 1960s. What makes Falcon Heavy, so special is the reusable booster rockets that detach in flight returned to earth, and land safely on landing sites nearby, so they can be reused again for another rocket.
The cost of this reusable rocket system will cut down from billions to millions. The cost of launching Falcon Heavy was 90million dollars while NASA’s SLS rocket costs 1 billion dollars per flight.
SpaceX conducted Falcon Heavy’s launch on February 6th, 2018,
Elon Musk’s role in sending car to space:
Elon Musk decided to place the Tesla Roadster as a test payload, the cherry red tesla has the only passenger which was the dummy driver, and named it Starman. The Starman dummy was wearing the same spacesuit NASA astronauts were about to wear for the next mission to the International Space Station in the next year, secured by seat belt the Starman right hand is holding the steering wheel while its left arm is resting on the door, here the interesting part is the dash dashboard screen reads “DON’T PANIC” which is a reference from the film, “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy“.
Many accessories were also added to Roadster like the Roadster toy car and on the dashboard a plaque bearing SpaceX employees’ names and a circuit board with the words “Made on earth by humans”, imprinted on it.
Can We Track The Location Of the Tesla car in space now?
After launching the car into space, the company fixed a camera live streaming orbiting Earth on YouTube until the batteries ran out. There is now a website called whereisroadster.com that can track its current location in the orbit. The website showed the car coming near to Mars orbit in October 2020. Elon Musk intends to send the car into the constant orbit around the Sun on Mars. Scientists have tested in hundreds of different possible ways and calculated that there is a 6% of chance of this car crashing into Earth and a 2.5% chance of crashing into Venus in the next 3.5 million years otherwise it will remain forever in space.
