When the car that you’ve owned for years has become old, worn down, maybe even broke-down, what do you do with it? Sell it to the first sucker who is willing to pay your price? Send it to the yard and wait for it to come back as a soup can? Drag it out into the desert and see how big of a mushroom cloud you can make with ten pounds of tannerite and one hell of a rifle? No matter what you do, one person is about to have you beat quite nicely: the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, is about to combine his two companies’ ideas into one event: he is taking his personal Tesla Roadster (the Lotus-based original version) and he’s sticking it into the payload bay of a Falcon Heavy rocket that will be launched in January on a trip that will take it to a Mars orbit, if it clears out of the atmosphere in one piece.

Normally, a faked payload uses something heavy to simulate the weight that the rocket is expected to handle. This didn’t seem appropriate for a Tesla venture, so the little Roadster is going to go into the stars. Now, we aren’t astrophysicists in any shape of the sense, but one thing we want to question: provided that the Tesla does wind up in orbit around Mars, doesn’t the orbit degrade over time? That would mean that eventually, the payload capsule has to drop onto Mars, whether in one piece or in a slightly more charred, dented form. Either way, it appears that Musk is going to have the first automobile on the Red Planet.

Clever.

• elonmusk: A Red Car for the Red Planet

  Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring.
  Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel.
  The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit.