Over the years, real-life Tony Stark Elon Musk has pulled a lot of impressive stunts, but surely none can compete with him sending very own $100,000 cherry red, convertible Tesla Roadster into space on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Not only that, Musk sent the car into orbit with the top down and David Bowie playing on the sound system. Now that's cool!

Suffice to say, the Roadster has now managed to clock up plenty of miles on the old speedometer on its journey through the cosmos. In fact, it's estimated to be about equal to driving every single road in the world 22 times! However, plenty of people have wondered this: where is it now?

Check out this amazing footage of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket:

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Well, Tesla has now revealed where the car actually is.

The car is travelling through space at thousands of kilometres per hour without fuel, due to the lack of inertia in deep space. When SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket launched back in 2018, it gave the car a huge speed boost, which propelled it towards Mars.

The car is now on an elliptical path around the sun, going past Venus and Mercury too. It completes one full orbit about every 557 days, and is scheduled to finish its first orbit before the end of 2019. In fact, researchers predict that the Roadster will orbit the sun for over a million years.

The car is too small to be seen with a telescope, but researchers from the University of Toronto believe that by the year 2091 it will likely pass close enough to earth that we'll be able to see it through a powerful enough lens. However, this isn't the first time we're written about space junk.

Check out this article we penned a while back all about all the trash that humans have left on the moon.

When SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time on February 6, 2018, Elon Musk made sure the maiden voyage would capture the world’s imagination. Instead of loading the test flight with standard equipment or an empty payload, the billionaire entrepreneur chose something much more eccentric: his own 2010 Tesla Roadster.

Nearly seven years later, the bright red convertible is still drifting silently through space, orbiting the Sun and reminding people just how audacious that launch was.

The car, complete with a mannequin nicknamed “Starman” dressed in a SpaceX spacesuit, was strapped into the driver’s seat before lift-off, per the Sky Live. Photographs of the vehicle with Earth looming in the background quickly went viral, turning the stunt into one of the most iconic moments in recent space exploration. Musk had labeled the attempt a 50–50 gamble, but it worked flawlessly, with Falcon Heavy proving its power as the most capable rocket in operation at the time.

While the launch was undeniably a demonstration of technical prowess, it was also designed as a joke, something Musk himself admitted. He said he wanted to send “the silliest thing we can think of” into orbit rather than something ordinary. Before the launch, he even polled people on social media for ideas, but ultimately settled on his own daily commuter car, one that he had driven to and from Tesla’s headquarters.

Since then, the Roadster has been on a cosmic journey that few could have predicted. According to the tracking site whereisroadster.com, the vehicle has now been in space for six years, eleven months, and twenty-five days, meaning its seventh anniversary is just weeks away. At present, the car is nearly 240 million miles from Earth and traveling at a blistering speed of almost 4,000 miles per hour. It is currently orbiting closer to the Sun, around 151 million miles away from the star. These staggering numbers make the Roadster not only the most unconventional car trip in history, but also the fastest car humanity has ever placed beyond Earth.

Of course, Musk added a few extra touches to ensure the journey would carry his trademark sense of humor. The car’s sound system was programmed to loop David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” continuously. If the battery still holds, the track would have played more than 694,000 times by now, per CNET. Inside the glove compartment, a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was stashed away, a nod to another interstellar adventure, along with a Hot Wheels miniature of the very same Roadster, perched on the dashboard.

Although some critics dismissed the stunt as a publicity ploy, the Tesla Roadster floating through space continues to be a symbol of both ambition and eccentricity. Long after the music stops and the car deteriorates from radiation, the memory of Starman cruising among the stars will remain one of the most unforgettable chapters in the modern space age.

Featured image credit: Marc Piasecki / Getty Images.

Elon Musk's latest SpaceX launch has - quite literally - gone up in flames.

On Thursday (April 20), during the largest launch in human history, SpaceX crew could only watch as the company's 120-meter Starship rocket system burst into flames.

The devastating scenes occurred just minutes after the rocket ship had blasted off from the Boca Chica, Texas base. It also provided quite a site for the crowds, who had reportedly gathered nearby before the sun came up.

As reported by the Daily Mail, shortly after liftoff, the unmanned rocket - the most powerful of its kind on the planet - started tumbling just four minutes into the flight. This came as it prepared to separate the Super Heavy booster from the Starship.

Nevertheless, Musk was not deterred and saw the launch as a learning experience.

He tweeted shortly after the explosion: "Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months."

This sentiment was echoed by the official SpaceX Twitter page, with reps for the company seemingly apprehensive about the launch and saying prior to lift-off: "With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship."

Additionally, after the launch, the company was not willing to let the explosion dampen its spirits, with officials tweeting: "With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary."

It added: "Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!"

This particular mission is just part of the learning curve for Musk's hopes to one day send people and cargo to the Moon and Mars.

If today's mission were successful, it would have seen Starship orbit the planet once before finally splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Musk has previously discussed his ambition for humans to become an inter-planetary species, saying: "I think it's important for the long-term preservation and ultimately the expansion and extension of the scope and scale of consciousness, and the long-term, probably, survival of the humanity and life as we know it, we must become a multi-planet species."

Featured image credit: Federico Rostagno / Alamy

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has been successfully launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, taking two US astronauts to the International Space Station.

Watch the stream below:

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Following liftoff, it will take the rocket 19 hours to reach the International Space Station (ISS).

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This comes after SpaceX's Starship prototype exploded during a test run in Boca Chica, Texas, and the entire event was broadcast on a live-stream on the NASA Spaceflight website.

Thankfully, there were no injuries as a result of the explosion, the Guardian reports, and it didn't affect the launch of Falcon 9.

You can see the dramatic footage from yesterday below:

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Falcon 9's first launch on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes remaining on the countdown clock due to stormy weather

SpaceX - the company founded by Elon Musk, who is its CEO - has teamed up with NASA for the historical mission that will be the first time that US astronauts have launched from US soil since 2011.

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After the delay, SpaceX and NASA waited for the International Space Station to be in the correct orbital position before launching Falcon 9 from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

Earlier today, the official SpaceX Twitter account shared footage of the two experienced astronauts, Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken, donning their spacesuits for the mission.

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This is a historic moment as it marks the first time that a private company has sent astronauts into space, per the Verge.

SpaceX was established back in 2002 by Musk with the original goal of reducing the costs of space travel and eventually allowing for the human colonization of Mars, the New York Times reports.

One of the ways that the company is enabling for more environmentally friendly space travel, Space.com reports, is through its reuse of the two pieces that make up SpaceX fairings. They are jettisoned, and this means that they can be used again instead of being discarded into the ocean as has previously been done.

Musk's plan to send a private rocket into space has been heavily documented, and at the start of 2018, the tech entrepreneur revealed the message to aliens he has written on a SpaceX rocket.