South Africa has a bad track record when it comes to car theft.

The words ‘Gympie Street’ were once enough to strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest Capetonian.

If you’re from elsewhere, Gympie Street is a side road in Woodstock. Before it was gentrified, just looking at it caused your valuables to disappear along with the wheels on your car (or your whole car, depending on the mood of whoever was working the area).

Now Gympie Street is the site of a very nice apartment building. Still, South Africa has no shortage of prime hijacking spots to avoid. 

Gympie Street had some sophisticated criminals, but not even they can match up to the heist planned by Kyle Hill, the host of Because Science on YouTube.

He doesn’t want to steal your lame Toyota. He’s after Elon Musk’s space car.

Jalopnik breaks it down:

While Musk’s eventual goal is Mars, Starman won’t ever land there and is destined to simply float in the deep blackness. That, therefore, requires a completely different set of mathematical calculations with way more variables. That’s where a totally awesome interplanetary trajectory calculator comes into play.

Now, it would take just over a year to meet up with Starman, and likely a similar timeframe to return, so you’d be in space for about two and a half years. Is it worth it to nab a $60,000 car? Probably not. But I heard that the treasure of One-eyed Willy is in the trunk, and some developers are going to bulldoze mom and dad’s house if we don’t buy out the property!

Yeah, I’m also lost and I have no idea what mom and dad’s house has to do with anything. Why don’t we just let Hill explain?

That all sounds good in theory, but I still have a lot of questions.

How would you extract it from the rocket? How do you store it in your own rocket for the journey home? How many crew members do you need?

Also, poor Starman. He didn’t ask for any of this.

All that aside, if you could pull it off, you’d have street cred for life.

Or is it space cred?

[source:jalopnik]