Earlier this month, Elon Musk made the world's jaw drop in amazement after SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket built by man in earth's orbit.
Not just that, Musk's SpaceX also launched a Tesla Roadster car towards Mars, just for kicks. Incredible, right? This is what the solar system's very first flying automobile is up to.
SpaceX
1) The car launched by Falcon Heavy into space is actually Elon Musk's own real-life Tesla Roadster.?"I love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future," Musk had said in December last year.
2) Images of Starman sitting in the front seat of the car, with the earth and sun spinning around it had earthlings thoroughly captivated.?The front seat dummy was named Starman as a reference to David Bowie¡¯s song of the same name.
SpaceX
3) In addition, on the dashboard of the floating car is a little red model car, with another tiny dummy inside it. It's not a joke!
5) The car has exceeded its 58,000 km warranty over 600 times since the time it was launched into space.
6) At the time of writing this, the Tesla Roadster car has travelled over 5.8 crore kilometres, at a maximum speed of 1,17,257 km/hour relative to the sun.
7)?So far through its travel, the flying Roadster has achieved a fuel economy of 75.9 km/liter or 1.32 liters/100 km, assuming 126,000 gallons of fuel needed for it to launch into space.
8) Contrary to what Elon Musk was hoping,?the Tesla car seems to have gotten too ahead of itself, by overshooting its original path. If the car can't slingshot around Mars, it won't have enough momentum to reach the rocky asteroid belt beyond Mars, as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had originally claimed.
Arch mission foundation
9)?The Tesla Roadster car also has a few "arch" (pronounced ¡°ark") onboard, as it tumbles through the solar system. An arch is a slice of quartz silica glass that¡¯s been written with a femtosecond laser at 20 nanometre gratings. That¡¯s a very technical way of saying the disk has a theoretical capacity of about 360TB, and can survive without its data being corrupted for over 14 billion years.
11) Believe it or not, but the Tesla car has a six percent chance of crashing back on earth in the next million years. Hopefully, by then humanity would've moved beyond just our home planet and away from the firing line.