Sorry, Elon, your Tesla roadster won't orbit for billions of years Explaining why he used his Tesla roadster as the test mass on his Falcon Heavy launch, Elon Musk remarked that he liked the idea of it orbiting for a billion years. If the car endures, a bunch of astroboffins from Canada and the Czech Republic reckon it's going to last just a mere few tens of millions of years. Running the …
In the next couple of hundred years, space explorers will retrieve the Tesla and mount it on a plinth at the Mars Spaceport as a dedication to Musk. Starman will finally be revealed as Jimmy Hoffa or Lord Lucan and the mystery will be solved.
As for us presently alive who witnessed this event, the difference between a BEEEELLION years of orbit or a few Tens of MEEELLION years means diddly shit to our long disintegrated corpses.
Starman was the corpse of David Bowie
Bowie was cremated, so he would be in the ash tray (provided the Roadster has one, not sure there). Starman is, in the proper supervillain tradition, Musk's arch nemesis, Jeff Bezos, and the appearance you've seen since the launch is a hologram run on AWS.
Airplane air corridor collisions are rare except for takeoff / landing, so are the chances of a crash happening infinitesimal? How much debris is there anyway between Earth and Mars? The other Musk story today (Satellites) referred to the 'Musketeers'! LOL... You Reg journos have too much fun!
I'm expecting an asteroid field collision, which causes a large chunk to be re-directed (via gravity assists of cause ;) ) to earth.
We will then be known as bringing the demise of our own tech! Whoops!
/Only partly sarcastic. But I really really hope someone did a risk assessment before aiming for Ceres!
You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is
Ah, but you also have to remember that some space craft will be passing through every point in the universe during some instant. So you are 100% likely to meet another craft if you or it are using the infinite improbability drive.
Put the kettle on, I fancy a nice hot cup of tea :-)
From the June 2050 issue of consumer reports: "After trying to fix the traction control and GPS issues of their space-Tesla for over a thirty years, the Tesla marketing department (the last surviving department of the otherwise long gone and forgotten company) finally gave up and declared chapter 7 bankruptcy".
I am waiting for the 'millionaire to crash car in to Earth, untold damage to wildlife expected, sign my petition NOW!' post.
BUT what if the car misses the earth as the planet is only showing its thin edge and not the full-pizza?
Or what if it plunges all the way through a thin bit?
Science, eh? doesn't tell you everything does it?
"Cherry red" just doesn't have the same style as "everything black, including black control lights on a black panel". Shame, really...
But i guess SpaceX realized early on that making a video of an all black car in front of the vast blackness of space might prove... somewhat difficult.
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