I knew we would get flying cars one day - Elon Musk to launch Tesla in Falcon Heavy

Elon Musk really will launch a Tesla Roadster on the first Falcon Heavy rocket


The Roadster will also be playing David Bowie’s Space Oddity, and is aiming to enter a “billion year elliptic Mars orbit,” should the launch go perfectly to plan. There’s at least a non-zero chance things won’t go smoothly, however – Musk himself has suggested that the first Falcon Heavy could end with a rocket explosion sometime shortly after takeoff.
Either way, we now know that a Tesla vehicle will indeed be aboard the Falcon Heavy when it takes it inaugural flight – propelled by 27 Merlin engines, or essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/e...la-roadster-on-the-first-falcon-heavy-rocket/

Been discussed for awhile in this thread:

https://www.rocketryforum.com/showt...p-most-recent-missions)&p=1746339#post1746339

Will be interesting to see if the car survives.
I can imagine all those 18-650 cells freezing and rupturing...leading to probable destruction.
We shall see how long it takes before it goes boom.

The car won't go boom. The FH rocket OTOH...... might go boom (but I feel at least 90% confidence it'll work).

Car has been stripped of things that could cause issues, the batteries being the #1 item on the hit list. And the tires won't be inflated, they're vented (probably simply took the stem valves out). And various other potential problem things taken care of, such as steering system probably welded fixed straight ahead.

Almost surely the onboard video in space will only last a few hours, however long the 2nd stage's batteries hold out (which is indeed hours, not even a day). There is no onboard "satellite bus" that would navigate the Tesla to Mars.... it's not going to Mars. They are flinging it away from Earth at a high enough escape velocity to probably reach an apogee as far out from the sun as Mars' distance from the sun, that car will probably never be close to Mars (never mind the artwork created by some, partly inspired by Musk's original very badly worded announcement regarding Mars, other ignoring the later clarifications. Or believing what they want to believe - or mislead others to believe, like clickbait).

Anyway, once the second stage burn to leave Earth Orbit is done to fuel depletion, the 2nd stage with Roadster will travel by inertia only from then on, coasting in an elliptical solar orbit. No mid course corrections, no communication, no video, no nothing after the stage's battery power runs out in a few hours.

This is a first test flight for which most rocket first tests are done with completely inert mass simulators such as concrete or water. No extra expense developing a custom oneshot upper stage / bus (or buying one from another company) when the rocket is unproven and has a significant chance of failure.