Space: the final frontier. Apparently now visible from a Tesla Roadster. For some reason.
Let’s back up a bit; the long and short of things here is that Elon Musk has launched his own Tesla Roadster into space using Falcon Heavy, an extremely powerful rocket. Elon Musk is the South African CEO of SpaceX, a private company that handles space travel. The Roadster it has blasted into outer space is traveling towards Mars, which Musk apparently plans to colonize. The key thing here though is that in addition to making this trip, the car has a camera on it that has allowed for us to see the space ride from its perspective. The video is up now, and you can check it out yourself:
If you do watch the video, you’ll notice a few interesting things. For one, there’s a pretty chilled out test dummy stealing the spotlight from the Tesla Roadster, and his name is Starman. He’s wearing a SpaceX-made suit specifically created for space travel, and so he’s along for the ride to show this off. You’ll also see stunning views of our very own planet Earth as the car soars away from it. What you might not be able to tell from that visual though is just how freaking fast the car is going at. It’s traveling at 25,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest-moving car ever– not self powered of course, but still. That’s incredible.
All of this wackiness does have a legitimate point though. It’s not all fun and games at SpaceX, which is using this outing as a way to test its rocket’s carrying capacity and show off its serious space travel potential to the public. Musk might’ve said he was kidding about putting his car out of orbit originally, but just like that it turns out that he wasn’t joking around at all with this showing. Mars is a long, long way away from Earth (almost 34 million miles apart at their closest points in orbit) and so being able to blast a rocket off into space that can carry a car weighing over two and a half tons that far is crazy. The advanced technical prowess it takes to do something like that is impressive, and it demonstrates that the public can expect wild things from this private space company.
