[imagesource: SpaceX]

In February 2018, Elon Musk launched the Falcon Heavy into space, with a few extras attached to the rocket including a Tesla Roadster, ‘piloted’ by Starman – a mannequin in a spacesuit doomed to listen to David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ for all eternity.

There are worse fates.

We may have moved on but Starman and the cherry red sports car are still out there, having cruised past Mars in October 2020.

In case you’re wondering what else that Tesla has been up to, CNN has the latest:

As of Monday, the roadster was about 234 million miles from Earth and about 200 million miles from Mars, passing through a no-man’s land of outer space, according to the tracking website whereisroadster, which uses NASA’s data to keep tabs on the car…

Image: Twitter / Elon Musk

Over the past four years, the roadster has traveled nearly 2 billion miles and completed about 2.6 loops around the sun, mostly through a barren, empty vacuum…

That’s a lot of miles on the clock to still be going strong.

Resale value might be affected by the odd ding, though:

The roadster is more than likely still in one piece, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CNN Business, but it’s likely been dinged by some meteoroids during its jaunt through the cosmos…

One academic paper estimated that the chances the car collides with the Earth within the next 15 million years at about 22%. The odds of it crashing into Venus or the Sun each stand at 12%…

If the car does wind up taking a crash course with Earth, we’ll have to hope it’s ripped into pieces as it slams back into the Earth’s thick atmosphere.

Seems a fitting ending but again, that’s very unlikely.

Musk, by the way, has said in the past that he hopes his descendants, living in human settlements on other planets, will “one day drag [the roadster] back to a museum”.

You can track the vehicle here.

[source:cnn]