SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Rocket to Launch for the First Time in December; Could Carry Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster Into Space

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By Robert Moore

Published Dec 4, 2017

This could get interesting

Back in July, we announced the new that Elon Musk might shoot off SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Rocket for the first time before the turn of the year. Come December 1st and Musk has tweeted that the rocket will, indeed, launch soon, but it won’t be until next month, or as of the date of that post, sometime in January of 2018. That goes beyond the “this year” timeframe but is quite exciting considering the number of times that Falcon Heavy has been delayed in the past. According to Musk, it will have double the thrust of the next largest rocket and the launch is “guaranteed to be exciting, one way or another.” Not long after that, Musk tweeted what seems to be a joke, saying “Payload will be my midnight cherry Tesla Roadster playing Space Oddity. Destination is Mars Orbit. Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn’t blow up on ascent.”

Truth be told, you can’t really discredit Musk’s apparent joke about sending his Roadster into space. After all, the man did place a secret wheel of cheese on top of Dragon’s first flight, and he has said that he intends to stick “the silliest thing we can imagine” on top of Falcon Heavy for its first voyage. Well, a Tesla Roadster, one in midnight cherry, would be pretty damn silly. And he, in fact, loves the idea, responding to another tweet saying, “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.” And, for what it’s worth, other outlets have claimed that SpaceX has confirmed that the “roadster payload is real.”

If the roadster payload does happen, and it does make it to Mars, let’s hope that he also follows up with a Tesla charger so that the crew that does go to Mars might have something else to get around in. Or perhaps he can send some solar panels too, so it can charge that way. All of this, assuming that the Roadster could even make it to Mars’ surface. Something tells me that Musk would rather have one of his creations floating endlessly into the great unknown. Let’s just pray that, if it does really happen, that some aggressive alien species doesn’t find it and come rape us of our resources – lord knows we’ve been warned about that by Hollywood more than a few times.