Tesla Car On The Way To Mars. X-1R Was There To Help

Elon Musk’s pioneering space company has just pulled off the near impossible: it has just successfully launched the massive rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, in a seamless launch from the Kennedy Space Centre today.

The launch was a test of the systems that could be used to send a manned mission to Mars in the coming years and, as we wrote yesterday, the only payload on the rocket was a certain Red Rooster, which is of course a Tesla Roadster complete with a space-suited dummy that will be listening to David Bowie's Space Oddity as it glides its way through space on route to Mars.

The massive Falcon Heavy rocket was moved to the launch pad from the Vehicle Assembly Building, along a 4.6-mile road, on the heavy-lift vehicles that were once used for the Saturn 5 moon shots and of course more recently the Space Shuttle programme. There are two of these vehicles, called Hans and Franz, which are famous for being the heaviest heavy-lift vehicles in the world, and are capable of carrying 12 million pounds of weight.

Read more and Hans and Franz here.

Our sponsor, X-1R Corporation, has been supplying these vehicles with the lubricants to keep them running for 22 years now. We're proud to be associated with a company that is involved with the next generation of space exploration at NASA.

The Vehicle Assembly Hangar is in the foreground with the launch pad in the far distance: