elon musk launches animation of spaceX falcon heavy on route to mars

with spaceX and their CEO elon musk, their almost constant and astronomically ambitious aims to further explore the unknown seems to be the only active thing in space at present (apart from the aliens, right?). towards the end of 2017, the entrepreneur announced that he is planning to send his personal tesla roadster into orbit, with a dummy sitting in the driving seat donning the spaceX spacesuit. well, in an all-new animation that blares out david bowie’s ‘life on mars?’, in actual fact, the car will not just ride in any test flight but rather in the highly anticipated launch of the ‘falcon heavy’ rocket.

all images courtesy of spaceX

said to be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, the spaceX ‘falcon heavy’ will have the ability to lift nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lbs). this amasses to a weight far greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel. for its launch, the first stage is composed of three ‘falcon 9’ nine-engine cores that provide five million pounds of thrust. after lift-off, and when in the outer atmosphere, two side boosters will separate and return to their landing sites for future use. travelling even further, the center core later detaches and returns to land on a drone ship in the atlantic ocean.

the final stage of the launch of the spaceX ‘falcon heavy’ sees the spacecraft’s top release the tesla roadster, where it will travel at a max velocity of 11 km/s (7 miles per second) until orbiting mars. whilst travelling 400 million km (250 million miles) from the earth, and working round the issues of listening to music in the vacuum that is space, musk claims the starman will be cruising whilst listening to ‘life on mars?’ by david blowie. however, in all seriousness, the test flight will mark as another step towards possibly sending crews to the moon and mars.