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SpaceX Falcon Heavy Sends Tesla Car In Orbit Around Earth: Video
Yes, a Tesla Roadster is orbiting Earth after Elon Musk and SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket. "Starman" is in the driver's seat.
Gutsy Elon Musk pulled off what even he wasn't sure would happen, successfully launching the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Tuesday afternoon from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It's bizarre for sure to see Musk's Tesla Roadster, an electric car, floating through space with a dummy nicknamed "Starman" in the driver's seat
The Falcon Heavy is the largest rocket launched into space in decades — NASA's Saturn V moon rocket in the early 1970s delivered more payload into orbit. Dummy payloads aren't unusual, but Musk tricked it up as only he can. The dummy is outfitted in a SpaceX suit. Along with a Hot Wheels roadster with a tiny spaceman, a sign on the dashboard reads: "Don't panic!" At one point during the launch, David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" played.
SpaceX delivered on the pre-launch promise, putting on quite a show.
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"When Falcon Heavy lifts off, it will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, with the ability to lift more than twice the payload of the next vehicle, at one-third the cost," the company said in a press release announcing the launch.
Musk has a flair for the unusual. So, why did he launch the car into space? Because he can? Musk and SpaceX are exploring space tourism, and its rockets may one day take humans on a trip around the moon. The Falcon Heavy may be just the beginning.
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Musk, a South African-born American Canadian businessman who heads both SpaceX and Tesla, expects the sports car to obit the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, cruising into deep space where it will join planets and comets in a trip around the sun. Over time, the Tesla is expected to brush Mars.
“At times it will come extremely close to Mars,” he said at a post-launch news conference Tuesday night. “And there’s a tiny chance that it will hit Mars. Extremely tiny.”
Musk said SpaceX successfully guided two of the Falcon Heavy's first-stag rocket boosters back to Earth, where they landed upright — in near perfect synchronization — at the Kennedy Space landing pad. That's never happened before.
"That was probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen— literally ever," Musk told reporters.
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