In February 2018, billionaire Elon Musk exercised his vocation for the spotlight, sending into space, as the first load of his new SpaceX rocket, a model of electric vehicle also unprecedented until then (and until today): the Tesla Roadster. Furthermore, the controversial entrepreneur required a driver to be behind the wheel of the convertible; actually a dummy nicknamed Starman, after the famous superhero of the 1940s.
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As soon as the Falcon Heavy rocket, which inaugurated the era of reusable launch vehicles, released its “cargo” into space, the electric car and its occupant were lost in the darkness of the so-called asteroid belt. This is because the initial idea, that the vehicle would enter Mars orbit and rotate in a loop, did not work due to a stronger thrust from the third stage of the rocket.
Where are the Tesla Roadster and Starman now?
Logically, after the initial highlight, the vehicle and the dummy lost their meaning and became just space junk of an earthly billionaire, which did not arouse interest in any observatory in accompanying it. However, the object officially constitutes a “celestial object” and is constantly monitored by NASA, as it does with any other type of bolide.
This fact led to the creation of the website Where is Roadster?, which has followed the whole saga of the electric car lost in space minute by minute. Anyone who decides to visit the domain will notice that the Tesla Roadster is currently 327,225,137 km from Earth, and rapidly moving away from us at a speed of 10,542 km/h. So far, the vehicle has traveled more than 4.59 billion km, describing a route around the Sun.
It’s difficult, however, to say where the vehicle is with absolute certainty – or to determine if it’s still in one piece, as it’s possible the car was damaged or destroyed by a meteoroid or corroded beyond recognition by radiation. Current data is based only on calculated estimates of the car’s trajectory.
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