[imagesource:whereisroadster.com]

Since it was launched out of the Earth’s atmosphere, Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster has travelled an unbelievable distance across space and time.

Although the cherry-red sports car, nicknamed Starman in honour of the late David Bowie, hasn’t been spotted since its launch in 2018, a dedicated website has been set up in the vehicle’s honour so that you can track its journey.

Six years ago, Musk decided to send one of his expensive cars shooting off into space as a ‘dummy payload’ for the first SpaceX mission of Falcon Heavy. The launch happened on February 6 2018, and featured the Tesla Roadster on board, with a spacesuit-clad mannequin sitting in the driver’s seat.

For real. When you own a space company and an electric car company, which makes you the wealthiest man on Earth, I guess you can do whatever the hell you like.

At the time of SpaceX’s rocket launch, Musk admitted that Falcon Heavy only had a 50/50 chance of succeeding, but it shot off without any major issues and ever since the Tesla has been floating around happily in space.

So where might Starman be now, exactly 6 years, 4 months, 5 days, 11 hours, 47 minutes and 50 seconds since launch?

The dedicated site, whereisroadster.com claims that right now, on 12 June, Musk’s Tesla is 115,467,035 kilometres (0.772 AU, 6.42 light minutes) from Earth, moving away from our humble planet at a speed of 38,446 km/h (10.68 km/s).

The site also mentions how the vehicle has shot far enough to drive all of the world’s roads 79.8 times and that it has completed around 4.1606 orbits around the Sun since its launch.

When Starman was shot to the high heavens, the mannequin was listening to Bowie’s seminal track ‘Space Oddity’ in one ear and ‘Is There Life on Mars?’ in the other, which means, if the battery is still working, he has listened to the former 628,347 times since its launch and its 1973 sequel 846,671 times.

If the experiment had any weight on Earth, he would obviously be David Bowie’s number one Spotify fan.

While the website makes it fun to speculate how far Musk’s electric sports car has travelled, it’s probably more likely that the car has ceased to exist, either decimated by a meteoroid or eroded as a result of radiation.

Then again, perhaps Musk’s descendants will be able to “drag the roadster back to a museum”, as he wished all those years ago.

[source:uniladtech]