Leave it to Elon Musk to follow up on a crazy idea. Earlier this month he said he’d send his personal Tesla Roadster to Mars aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, and some people wondered if he was joking. But the SpaceX CEO appears to be going through with the plan – today he shared images of a red electric car in the rocket‘s nose cone.
A red Tesla Roadster is headed to the red planet. Musk snuck in nods to three of his companies in an Instagram post, saying, “Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring. Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit.”
Related: Elon Musk wants to send his Tesla Roadster to Mars in SpaceX rocket
Twitter user Emiliano C. Diaz de Leon said he glimpsed a sneak peak of the Falcon Heavy during a bus tour of the Kennedy Space Center. The rocket is set to launch from Cape Canaveral – Florida Today said there’s no launch date as of yet.
We got a sneak peek at @SpaceX #FalconHeavy rocket while taking the bus tour. #SpaceX pic.twitter.com/18gnRCXobF
— Emiliano C. Diaz de Leon (@ECDiazdeLeon) December 26, 2017
The Falcon Heavy’s first stage features three Falcon 9 nine-engine cores with 27 Merlin engines able to produce over five million pounds of thrust upon launch – twice as powerful as the next most powerful rocket we have, according to Florida Today. The three boosters are designed to land back on Earth – the two side cores at Cape Canaveral and the middle one on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX said 2018 could bring the first launch of astronauts to orbit from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011.
Via Elon Musk on Instagram, Florida Today and Inverse
Images via SpaceX Twitter
