Starman and the Roadster That Left Earth

A few hours after liftoff on February 6, 2018, a camera on a rocket's upper stage showed a picture nobody had seen before: a red Tesla Roadster with its top down, Earth curving blue and white behind it, and a figure in a white spacesuit sitting in the driver's seat. The figure's right hand rested on the steering wheel and its left elbow sat on the open window sill, the pose of someone on a long, easy drive. SpaceX called the mannequin Starman, and the feed it streamed from three cameras on the car (one on the hood, one behind Starman's shoulder and one looking back at Earth) became the most improbable car commercial ever broadcast.

The car was not a prop built for the occasion. It was Musk's own first-generation Roadster, one of about 2,450 built on Lotus-derived chassis at Hethel, England, before production ended in January 2012. Tesla had delivered the first production Roadster, P1, to Musk on February 1, 2008. Almost exactly ten years later, a Roadster from that same small run was leaving the planet.

A new rocket's first flight is a gamble, and customers rarely want their satellites on it. Test flights usually carry dead weight, often something like a block of concrete, to prove the vehicle can lift real mass. In early December 2017, Musk said the maiden Falcon Heavy would carry something else. Because the launch was risky, he wrote, it would carry the "silliest thing we can imagine."

Then he named it. "Payload will be my midnight cherry Tesla Roadster playing Space Oddity. Destination is Mars orbit," Musk posted on December 2, 2017. He added that the car would "be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn't blow up on ascent." Plenty of readers assumed it was a joke. Electrek's headline the same day asked whether he was really launching a Roadster into space. He was.

The announcement landed barely two weeks after another Roadster moment. On November 16, 2017, at the Tesla Semi event in Hawthorne, California, a prototype of the second-generation Roadster rolled out of the back of a Semi trailer as a surprise. Tesla claimed 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds and a top speed above 250 mph, with a base price of $200,000 and a $250,000 Founder's Series. Within weeks, the Roadster name was in the news twice: once as Tesla's next flagship and once as a rocket payload.

SpaceX dressed the car carefully. Starman wore a SpaceX pressure suit. On the dashboard screen, in large letters, were the words "DON'T PANIC," a nod to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Mounted on the dash was a Hot Wheels miniature Roadster with its own tiny Starman, a car driving a car. A circuit board on the vehicle carried the message "Made on Earth by humans."

Tucked inside was a small object with a longer purpose. The Arch Mission Foundation supplied an Arch (pronounced "ark"), a laser-written quartz optical storage device designed to survive the harsh environment of space. On it the foundation stored Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, the science fiction series about preserving knowledge through a dark age, which the foundation named as the original inspiration for its mission. The car's sound system was set to loop "Space Oddity," the David Bowie song Musk had promised in December.

Falcon Heavy lifted off at 3:45 p.m. Eastern (20:45 UTC) on February 6, 2018, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket was essentially three Falcon 9 first stages strapped side by side, with an upper stage and the Roadster on top.

The two side boosters separated, turned around and flew back to Cape Canaveral, where they landed in a double touchdown that became the day's signature image. The center core did not make it. It was supposed to land on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic, but two of its three landing engines failed to light. It struck the water about 100 meters (328 feet) from the ship at roughly 300 mph, and the impact damaged two of the ship's thrusters. Musk later explained there was "not enough ignition fluid to light the outer two engines after several three engine relights." The fluid was triethylborane, the starter chemical Falcon engines use to ignite.

Losing the core cost SpaceX a booster, not the mission. The upper stage, with the Roadster attached, was on its way.

The upper stage did something unusual next: it waited. For about six hours it coasted through the Van Allen radiation belts, the zones of charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field. Before launch Musk said the stage would "get whacked pretty hard" by high-energy particles. The long coast was the real engineering test of the day. It demonstrated a capability the U.S. Air Force wanted, a stage that could survive hours in orbit and relight to place heavy satellites directly into geostationary orbit.

The live views from the car did not last as long as SpaceX planned. The Roadster's power was expected to run the cameras for about 12 hours. Accounts of how long the feed actually ran differ: several reports put the transmission at roughly four hours, while Space.com placed the end of the live views around 3:45 a.m. Eastern the following morning. Either way, by the time most of the United States woke up on February 7, the car had gone quiet.

Then came the third burn. It worked, and it worked harder than the plan. "Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt," Musk posted. Instead of an orbit that reached out to Mars's distance from the sun, the Roadster was now on a path that swung farther out.

The Roadster left Earth's gravity entirely and became an artificial satellite of the sun. Its orbit is an ellipse with its closest point to the sun near Earth's own distance, about 0.986 astronomical units, and its farthest point beyond the orbit of Mars, about 1.664 astronomical units. One lap takes about 557 days, roughly a year and a half, and the orbit is tilted only about 1.1 degrees from the plane of Earth's orbit. Musk's post said the car kept going to the asteroid belt; later orbit calculations describe the far end of the loop as reaching the inner edge of the main belt.

Space agencies file the car the way they file any launched object. Its international COSPAR designation is 2018-017A, and its U.S. satellite catalog number is 43205. A car registration, in other words, issued by the people who track spacecraft.

The Roadster's first close pass by Mars came on October 7, 2020. Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell calculated that Starman passed about 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers) from Mars at 2:25 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time that day, comfortably within the 5 million miles CNN reported.

A car in solar orbit has no odometer anyone can read, so someone built one. Ben Pearson, founder of Old Ham Media, created whereisroadster.com, which uses position data from the Horizons system run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The site shows the Roadster's distance from Earth and Mars, its speed and a diagram of where it sits among the inner planets, and it became the place people check when they wonder where the car has got to.

The car resurfaced in an unexpected way in January 2025. On January 2 the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a new object, designated 2018 CN41, on an orbit that came less than 150,000 miles from Earth, closer than the moon. Less than 17 hours later the center deleted the listing. The object was not an asteroid. It was Musk's Roadster, picked up by an amateur astronomer who had strung together observations of what he took to be a natural body.

For SpaceX, the Roadster was ballast with a sense of humor. For Tesla, it was attention on a scale no car launch had reached. SpaceX's launch stream peaked at more than 2.3 million simultaneous viewers on YouTube, second at the time only to Felix Baumgartner's 2012 stratosphere jump, and the launch and in-space feeds drew millions more views within a day. Tesla did not buy an ad. The only car in the picture was a Tesla, driven by a figure in a spacesuit, with Earth in the rearview.

Not everyone applauded. Critics called the car one more piece of space junk and asked whether a car that had never been cleaned to planetary protection standards should be sent toward Mars at all. Orbital debris expert Darren McKnight took the other side, saying the car posed no risk far from Earth orbit and that "the enthusiasm and interest that [Musk] generates more than offsets the infinitesimally small 'littering' of the cosmos."

The payload also closed a loop for the car itself. The first Roadster had proved to a skeptical industry that an electric sports car could work, and it kept Tesla alive long enough to build the Model S. A decade later, one of those same cars became the payload that proved a rocket. It is still out there, circling between Earth and Mars on a path that brings it back near Earth's orbit roughly every year and a half, with a mannequin at the wheel and a quartz copy of Foundation in the car.