How the Voyage of the Red Tesla and Starman Through the Wilderness of Space Will Look

Last week, Musk’s launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket heading towards Mars captured public attention worldwide, reports CNN. The most dramatic scene of the endeavor occurred four minutes after liftoff when the rocket jettisoned the first module, revealing a red Tesla car with a mannequin astronaut at the wheel, named Starman.

The live broadcast, which looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie, showed Starman in the Tesla sailing through the wilderness of space while David Bowie’s hit ”Life on Mars?” played on the radio, attracting a million viewers. The broadcast lasted about four and a half hours until the camera batteries ran out.

It is likely that Starman’s journey through the vacuum will last for many years, witnessed by a series of upcoming generations. Although Musk announced that the final destination of this journey is Mars, experts believe the probability of that is negligible.

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According to NASA data, Starman will sail closer to the Sun than Mars, specifically at about 250 million kilometers away from the Sun.

Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell conducted an analysis indicating that Starman will complete a full orbit around the Sun in September 2019 and continue to loop, meaning it will circle that star every 19 months. However, the analysis is based on projections, and things may change as the orbit develops.

According to claims by world astronomers, the car will soon be too far from Earth to be tracked by telescopes, and the next time it will be visible from Earth will be only at the end of the century. Specifically, it could be seen only in 2073, but it is difficult to make accurate predictions.

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It is also possible that by then, people will mistake the Tesla for an asteroid until they realize it is actually a human-made object mimicking the trajectory and brightness of an asteroid. To avoid confusion, the object has been cataloged as an artificial celestial body.

McDowell, however, believes that by 2073, humans will colonize the planets of the Solar System, so Musk’s successors will easily ‘catch’ the Tesla and store it in a museum.