Around 4-years-ago in February 2018, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sent a Tesla Roadster piloted by ‘Starman’ on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Currently, it’s over 234-million miles from Earth and about 194-million miles from Mars, a no-man’s land of outer space if you will. This means that that vehicle has traveled nearly 2-billion miles and completed around 2.6 loops around the Sun, mostly through a barren vacuum. Read more for a video and additional information.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says that the Tesla Roadster is still most likely in one piece, but it’s probably been dinged up by small meteoroids. On a related note, there was one academic paper that estimated the chances of it colliding with the Earth in the next 15-million-years being at around 22%, with the odds of it venturing into Venus or the Sun being 12%.
It has achieved a fuel economy of 15,802.2 miles per gallon (6,718.2 km/liter, 0.01488 liters/100 km), assuming 126,000 gallons of fuel. If the battery was still working, Starman has listened to Space Oddity 400,865 times since he launched in one ear, and to Is there Life On Mars? 540,148 times in his other ear,” according to Where is my Roadster?
My car is currently orbiting Mars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 4, 2021