On February 6, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center site 39A.
For a whole year the car Ilona Mask has been plowing space On February 6, 2018, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket flew its first flight by launching a Tesla cherry-red car with a dummy at the wheel into orbit around the Sun.
The car travels along an elliptical trajectory that takes it beyond Mars at its apogee (the most distant point from the Sun) and near Earth's orbit in perigees (the closest point to the star).
The SpaceX dummy is inside the red Tesla Ilona Mask machine against the background of the Earth. The launch was conducted on a Falcon Heavy rocket on February 6, 2018
The car and the driver left Mars in early November, and are still there at a distance of 364 million km from Earth. For some time the machine will stay there, since the orbital period takes 557 Earth days.
Tesla must complete a few laps around the Sun before her deep space adventures come to an end. Orbital modeling predicted that space transport would eventually crash into Venus or burn into the earth’s atmosphere over the next several tens of millions of years. There is only a 6% chance that the car will fall to Earth in the next million years and 2.5% for a collision in the same period of time with Venus. Debut flights of any missile are fraught with risk, so they usually carry fictitious payloads, rather than valuable spacecraft. Ilon Musk chose a car and a mannequin for fun and attention.
The second flight of a large rocket is scheduled for March 7, when it should launch a 6.6-ton communication satellite Arabsat 6A into orbit for Saudi Arabia. Falcon Heavy two-stage rocket is considered the most powerful today. The first stage is represented by three modified first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket. The first stage boosters are designed for repeated use.
