Elon Musk: I want to shoot my Tesla to Mars

cape canaveral - The colorful businessman Elon Musk is not averse to a good publicity stunt. He sold flamethrowers and caps, he canceled his salary for the coming years and built the largest battery in the world within a hundred days. But next week he wants to do something completely new. His own space company, SpaceX, has to shoot his own car from his own brand Tesla on Tuesday.

The car is a red Tesla Roadster, which must be brought to the red planet Mars. He needs to turn around that for the next billion years. 'We were looking for the stupid object we could think of,' said Musk. Because there is a real chance that the launch will fail. Then no crucial satellite should be lost, and certainly no human life.

In space, the Tesla Roadster becomes the fastest car ever, with a speed of about 42,000 kilometers per hour. According to Musk, the song Space Oddity by David Bowie will sound out of the speakers of the car, although there is not much to hear about in the vacuum.

The launch is a test of the new Falcon Heavy rocket. That is the strongest rocket since Saturn V, which brought man to the moon in the sixties and seventies. The 27 engines of the Falcon Heavy have the power of eighteen Boeings 747 on take-off, SpaceX says.

The Heavy is the increased version of the Falcon 9, which has been used in recent years to supply the international space station ISS. And that's not all. Musk and his people already work on an even bigger successor: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).

The BFR must bring people to Mars, a holy grail for Musk. He wants to colonize the red planet. Each rocket would have to carry a hundred passengers plus freight, for a rate of about two tons per person, he said in 2016. According to him, the first scouts will have to go in five to ten years. And on earth, the BFR can also be used as a successor to the aircraft. According to Musk, everyone can go to the other side of the earth within an hour. A trip from New York to Shanghai could take half an hour, he implored.

Musk is a centipede. He is not only the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, he is also a founder of payment service PayPal, he conceived the hyperloop (a kind of vacuum train), wants to use The Boring Company to build new tunnel networks among cities, develops new solar panels with SolarCity and he wants to Neuralink make brain chips that can help against Parkinson's and epilepsy. The wealth of the South African born is estimated at more than 20 billion dollars (almost 17 billion euros).