Why did Elon Musk really shoot his car into space on the most powerful rocket on Earth?
Elon Musk’s Space Tesla Isn’t Going to Mars. It’s Going Somewhere More Important!
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has managed to pull off the stunning feat of shooting aboard the most powerful rocket on Earth. But it’s just the beginning.
The mission is a test of a rocket that could come to define the coming decades. And the battle to make that happen — to become the defining and most efficient way of carrying things and people into our solar system — could be the beginning of a new space race.
For now, the world is incredibly excited by the successful launch of the rocket. In a test that SpaceX founder Elon Musk suggested could just become the greatest firework show ever seen if it went wrong, the rocket actually managed to lift off, with all of the mission going entirely to plan.
But part of the excitement is the strange feeling of living in science fiction that it provoked. Watching livestreams of an electric car floating in space, while the boosters that carried it there softly land themselves back on Earth, it’s hard not to feel that we’re living in the future.
The ways that the mission and the rocket at the centre of it are used will come to define our future, too. It is the beginning of the most important market in the universe, and some of the most spectacular trips ever seen; we are going to leave the Earth and explore the planets of our solar system, it seems, and a Tesla car and the dummy inside it have had a taste of that future.
Why is there all this excitement?
Partly, it’s natural. The rocket is tremendously powerful. That’s not just important in itself: it’s also a marker of the fact that the US is moving back to pulling its weight in terms of rockets, and a reminder that variations on this kit could eventually be used to take people to the moon and Mars.
The installation of Mr Musk’s own car in the rocket is a sign of the real reason this launch is such a big deal: it is being done by a man with a flair for a story, and the desire to make people talk about him and what he’s doing. There’s no reason for the car to be going to space apart from as a talking point — indeed, the rocket could carry some important scientific instruments instead — but when viewed as a publicity stunt for a private space company that hopes to be the future of corporate space travel, everything makes a little more sense.
