Elon Musk will attempt to fly the world’s most powerful rocket later with his own sports car on the top. The US entrepreneur’s Falcon Heavy launcher is designed to have twice the lifting capacity of any other vehicle. But because of the historic high failure rate of maiden flights, only a dummy payload is being risked.
Mr Musk has decided this should be his old cherry-red Tesla roadster with a space-suited mannequin strapped in the driver’s seat. David Bowie’s classic hit Space Oddity will be looping on the radio as the car is hurled into an elliptical orbit that stretches out to Mars’ orbit around the Sun.
“[The roadster will] get about 400 million km away from Earth, and it’ll be doing 11km/s,” he told reporters in a briefing on Monday. “We estimate it will be in that orbit for several hundred million years, maybe in excess of a billion years.” Three cameras attached to the car would provide “epic views”, Mr Musk added. Thousands of spectators are expected to descend on Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to witness the ascent, which could occur as early as 13:30 EST (18:30 GMT).
Falcon Heavy sends a car to Mars https://t.co/Y7uBtU6Mt2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2018
Mr Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has given itself three hours to get the vehicle up on Tuesday. If technical glitches lead to a postponement, a second attempt will be made on Wednesday.
The Falcon Heavy is essentially three of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 vehicles strapped together. But the triple-booster configuration has demanded a number of specific alterations, including a strengthening of the central core booster. The 27 Merlin engines at the base of the rocket should be capable of generating almost 23,000 kilonewtons of thrust – slightly more than double that of the world’s current most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, which is operated by US competitor United Launch Alliance.
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