SpaceX
Billionaire Elon Musk is constantly in the spotlight of the world thanks to the innovations of the companies he leads and the peculiar inventions he presents. Among the most notorious eccentricities is the feat of launching a Tesla into space, a maneuver that has kept viewers wondering where this vehicle is now or what happened to it.
The car was launched in 2018 and four years later the behavior of this Tesla continues to be monitored on its journey through space prior to the moment in which it will inevitably be disintegrated by the conditions of the environment, as indicated by a specialized chemist from the University of Indiana during an interview with the American media AutoBlog, although he predicted a life span of no more than a year.
Thus, contrary to what the academic predicted, this electric car continues to move, and today in Autopistas we will tell you what happened to the Tesla Roadster launched aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket by Elon Musk and what its current whereabouts are.
On February 6, four years have passed since the day Elon Musk executed what would be the beginning of one of the most ambitious feats of his career: taking his legacy to space with the help of state-of-the-art technology promoted by his own companies.
To achieve this, a plan carefully supervised by a team of experts was launched, giving way to the birth of the Falcon Heavy, a rocket designed by SpaceX, a company of which Musk is the founder.
The Falcon Heavy was designed to withstand both the extreme conditions of space and the circumstances of each trip made, which was clear with its first flight in 2018, whose takeoff was made at the NASA John F. Kennedy Space Center, located in Florida.
The same platform used to take men to the Moon was used in the launch, a feature that added spectacularity to the event witnessed by thousands of people around the world through real-time transmissions.
This first flight was made with a Tesla Roadster, a cherry red sports car with an open top. Inside the vehicle, in the driver’s position, a mannequin dressed as an astronaut called Starman was placed, which was named as a tribute to David Bowie’s song, a melody that talks about the existence of a man or creature in space that watch everything from there.
Despite the predictions of various personalities in the scientific community, the Tesla Roadster that took off from Earth almost 1,500 days ago, still survives in the elements of space, with a distance traveled of approximately 3,198,296,980 kilometers, a figure that is updated daily by the Wheristheroadster portal, dedicated to monitoring the journey of the electric car.
Although it is impossible to know the exact location of the Tesla in space, according to one of the latest reports from the observatory, this vehicle is an estimated 378 million kilometers from Earth, and its constant trajectory is 800 kilometers per hour. This could mean that the trip is equivalent to a length of about 50 times the total distance of all highways and roads in the world, for which 126,000 gallons of fuel would be needed.
Another of the concerns held by space enthusiasts refers to whether there is any kind of risk that the Tesla will hit or be hit by another object that orbits close to it, which could trigger the detachment of its parts, generating the fear that subsequently fall to Earth.
Given this, a study published by arXiv, showed that the chances of the car colliding with our planet within the next 15 million years are 22%, while for Venus or the Sun they are also 22%, so in the short term it does not represent any danger, especially considering that the Tesla Roadster is unlikely to survive for that long.
For its part, data compiled by NASA mention that it will be until 2025 when it passes close to Mars, while in 2047 and 2050, it could present rotations millions of miles from Earth.