Elon Musk Makes It Official: Falcon Heavy is Taking Tesla Roadster to Mars

Danny Paez
Updated
“A Red Car for the Red Planet.”

What sounded like a prank when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk firstborn floated it earlier this month became real Friday: His car is headed to outer space.

Musk confirmed on his Instagram that the long-awaited first flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket in January 2018 will carry Musk’s own Tesla Roadster as its payload.

Mars is the mission’s destination, though it won’t actually be touching down on the Red Plant. It will instead be going into a billion year orbit around our planetary neighbor.

Oh, and Musk revealed his car will be looping David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” throughout the journey. It’s a fitting anthem to this monumental mission, though presumably he is saving “Life on Mars” for when SpaceX starts building Musk’s planned Martian’s settlement.

All of this was tweeted out by Musk on December 1. But the tech mogul is known to have some prolific Twitter fingers, leading observers wondering if this was nothing more than a joke.

After all, the Falcon Heavy’s launch has been pushed back at least five years, so it would be understandable if SpaceX carried out the mission in as straightforward and low-key a way as possible. But in classic Musk fashion, he has decided to go with the flashier approach.

Any doubts that Musk wouldn’t be rocketing his Roadster into outer space were quelled Friday. He posted pictures on Instagram of his electric car situated between rocket fairings, which are the blast shields found at the tip of the rocket that are used to protect payloads.

A Red Car for the Red Planet Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring. Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit.

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Dec 22, 2017 at 10:47am PST

Regardless of what’s inside the Falcon Heavy, a successful launch would break records in the aerospace sector. Its 27 Merlin engines are capable of generating 5.1 million pounds of thrust at full power, according to a Spaceflight Now report. This would make it the most powerful currently operational rocket in the world.

SpaceX also plans to be able to recover the rocket cores used for this launch, allowing them to continue using this rocket for future space missions to the moon and Mars.

Hopefully they’ll send more than a Roadster next time.

Photos via Elon Musk

Photos via Elon Musk

Written by Danny Paez

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