The story
The story of Starman and the Tesla Roadster in space
On February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched a cherry-red Tesla Roadster with a mannequin called Starman at the wheel on the first Falcon Heavy. The car never came back: it is now in its own orbit around the Sun, 98.7 million km from Earth today.
A car instead of a concrete block
A new rocket’s first flight is risky, so test flights usually carry a dummy “mass simulator” instead of a real satellite. For the first Falcon Heavy, SpaceX used a 2010 Tesla Roadster, Elon Musk’s own car, mounted on top of the rocket’s second stage.
The launch
Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on February 6, 2018 at 20:45 UTC. The webcast of the car floating above Earth ran for just over four hours. After about five hours in orbit around Earth, a final burn of the second stage sent the car out of Earth orbit and into a path around the Sun.
What’s in the car
- Starman, a full-size mannequin in a SpaceX pressure suit, in the driver’s seat. The name comes from the David Bowie song.
- The sound system was set to loop Bowie’s Space Oddity. Musk estimated the car’s battery would last a little over 12 hours, so the music stopped long ago.
- A copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a towel in the glove box, and a “DON’T PANIC!” sign on the dashboard.
- A Hot Wheels model Roadster with a tiny Starman on the dashboard.
- A small optical disc from the Arch Mission Foundation storing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, as a test of long-lasting data storage.
- A circuit board reading “Made on Earth by humans”, and a plaque with the names of more than 6,000 SpaceX employees.
Where it went
The Roadster is still attached to the rocket’s upper stage, which was confirmed shortly after launch. Together they circle the Sun every 557 days on an orbit that swings from 147.5 million km from the Sun, just inside Earth’s orbit, out to 249.0 million km, beyond Mars. It flew past Mars at about 7.4 million km on October 7, 2020, and its next close pass by Earth is predicted for January 11, 2047. See the full timeline.
Can anyone see it?
Telescopes followed it for about six weeks after launch. Two days after liftoff it was around magnitude 15.5; by mid-June 2018 it had faded past magnitude 26, far too faint for any amateur telescope. Its orbit today is calculated from 374 measurements made between February 8 and March 19, 2018. In January 2025 old survey images of it were briefly mistaken for a new asteroid, catalogued as 2018 CN41, until astronomers recognized the Roadster and withdrew the listing.
What’s left of it?
Nobody has seen the car up close since the webcast ended. Chemist William Carroll predicted that unfiltered sunlight, cosmic radiation and tiny meteoroid impacts would break down the tyres, paint, plastics and leather within about a year, leaving mostly the aluminium frame, metal parts and any glass that survives.
Will it ever come back?
Not on purpose. A 2018 study by Hanno Rein, Daniel Tamayo and David Vokrouhlický simulated the car’s orbit over three million years and found about a 6% chance it eventually hits Earth and 2.5% that it hits Venus. Read more in the questions and answers.
Sources
- NASA/JPL Horizons, object record for target -143205 (Tesla Roadster): launch details, payload stack, observations, close approaches.
- Wikipedia: Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster, and the sources cited there.
- H. Rein, D. Tamayo, D. Vokrouhlický, “The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets”, Aerospace (2018), arXiv:1802.04718.
Explore
Data: NASA/JPL Horizons (target -143205), updated October 15, 2026.
