Tesla goes to Mars
 

Elon Musk testing SpaceX new launch system, Falcon Heavy rocket, successor to the Falcon 9. It'll have three boosters strapped together, making it the most powerful rocket in the world. Instead of a dummy 'expendable' load, he'll put his personal Tesla Roadster. Not risking a paying customer's expensive payload, create the best marketing idea/buzz for two companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Destination Mars orbit. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/...s-falcon-heavy

Brilliant! I've always thought space was an untapped marketing vehicle.

My idea is to shoot powerful lasers at the (new) moon to display advertisements. Billboard for the world.

Probably cheaper to setup a screen in LEO, which would reach less people, but work on any sufficiently dark night.

I bet he's going to turn up here bragging about his coasting distance.

Will it be a shell of a car with ballast, or are they building a drivable unit and sending that?

It said "His personal Tesla."

Right, but has he pulled all of the potentially explosive batteries out of it, or are they going up too?

Now we're turning SPACE into an automotive junkyard...to complement it already being a ROCKET junkyard?

Hey, there is a lot of space to fill compared to land to fill.

Some day we may accumulate enough garbage up there that we'll need low earth orbit trash collectors.

LEO has its own trash mitigation system built in; atmospheric drag. Orbiting objects including debris slow due to drag, and eventually fall towards Earth and burn up.

Higher orbits have less atmospheric drag and objects can linger for longer periods, but then there is increased "space" in those higher orbits since volume increases exponentially with radius.

This isn't to say that we can safely ignore the consequences of placing objects in space, only that the likelihood of problems due to garbage is relatively low. Of course, with the decreasing cost of sending stuff into orbit, this will be an increasing consideration.