![]() ![]() "We did not really test any of those materials for space. The Roadster was not modified, nor apparently tested, to guarantee its survival on its trip into deep space. "We'd have way better CGI if it was fake. "You can tell it is real because it looks so fake," said Musk. Click to enlarge video and view in new, pop-up window. The video sent back from the Roadster showed the car and its Starman passenger set against an almost full-disc Earth as it climbed to as high as 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) above the planet. ![]() For the next few million, if not billion years or so, the Starman - named in tribute to the late David Bowie - will travel through the inner solar system. The Falcon Heavy, now the most powerful operational rocket in the world, not only reached space, but also demonstrated - with a second firing of its second stage engine - the booster's ability to put a satellite directly into geosynchronous orbit.Īnd then the second stage engine lit again, putting the Roadster and its Starman passenger on what was expected to be a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit, but will overshoot the Red Planet's orbit. The center core, which was intended to land on an ocean-based droneship, instead hit the water hard and exploded, the only blemish on an almost perfect first flight. The boosters, each a modified Falcon 9 first stage that had flown before, touched down within seconds of each other at SpaceX's landing zones at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. As it climbed toward space, the Falcon Heavy survived Max Q, the point of maximum dynamic air pressure, and its two side boosters separated from the center core successfully, something SpaceX had never tried in flight before. The 230-foot-tall (70 meter) rocket lifted off on the thrust generated by 27 engines from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:45 p.m. "I am still trying to absorb all that happened because it still seems pretty surreal to me," he said. "The mission seems to have gone really as well as one could have hoped." "I am really excited about today and proud of the SpaceX team," said Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO and lead designer, in a post-flight press conference. The car served as a mass simulator, taking the place of a real payload given the risks that the test flight might have failed. 6) as a finale to SpaceX's maiden launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket. The improbable, if also surreal scene, captured in a video broadcast back to Earth, unfolded live on Tuesday evening (Feb. Starman is traveling through the solar system, riding in the driver's seat of a midnight cherry Tesla Roadster with the top down. ![]()
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