Elon Musk, purveyor of electric roadsters and retail flamethrowers, is also apparently a huge David Bowie fan. Not only is the animated simulation of SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon Heavy flight to Mars above set, fittingly, to Bowie’s “Life On Mars?” but he also has Bowie-related plans for just what Falcon Heavy is taking with it to the Red Planet.
According to Verge, Musk boasted that, instead of a dummy payload of concrete or steel, the Falcon Heavy test flight will contain a Tesla Roadster, planned to float around in the big, black beyond for a billion years, playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BdA94kVgQhU/?utm_source=ig_embed
“Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel,” Musk said in an Instagram post explaining the unusual choice of payload for the flight. “Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring.” He said back in March of last year, that SpaceX would be striving to send up “the silliest thing we can imagine,” so I guess they succeeded. He also notes that the whole experiment could end in flames, but either way, it’s a fantastic publicity stunt that actually serves at least somewhat of a practical purpose.
Also, the aliens’ first exposure to Earth culture will be one of the coolest rock stars our tiny blue rock ever produced, so maybe they won’t come down on us lasers blasting whenever they arrive thanks to Elon Musk.
