Unearthly Stats on Spaced-Out Tesla Roadster


Spaceman calmly motoring over Earth in his Tesla Roadster

Powered by the most powerful booster since NASA’s Saturn V, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket lifted off earlier this month with a Tesla Roadster as its payload. The FHR’s two side boosters stuck their simultaneous landing as you can see and hear (double sonic booms!) here. Unfortunately, the rocket’s main booster missed its landing on an offshore drone ship. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, attributed this failure to a shortfall of ignition fluid, for which the “fix is fairly obvious.”

Starman’s Tesla Roadster will be a very high-mileage car by the time it crashes back into the earth, or perhaps Venus or maybe the sun, after about 10 million years. (As detailed here the calculations remain very uncertain.) If you wonder where Starman might be, go to this website. As of today, he’s over 3 million miles away from earth, moving at a rate of 7,463 miles per hour. It’s good that Starman is a dummy because otherwise he would suffer from the worst earworms ever, having already listened to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” 5000 times in one ear and the singer’s Life on Mars in the other ear nearly 7000 times.

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