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SpaceX animation shows what Elon Musk’s Roadster will look like on its way toward Mars

SpaceX animation shows what Elon Musk’s Roadster will look like on its way toward Mars

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Let the countdown to tomorrow’s launch begin

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Roughly 24 hours before SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is supposed to blast off for the first time ever, CEO Elon Musk just shared an animated video of what it will look like when the new giant rocket releases a Tesla Roadster into space.

The animation is a sort of updated version of the computer-generated Falcon Heavy video that the company released a few years ago. But this new version shows roughly where the all-electric sports car will sit within the rocket’s payload fairing, and includes a new section at the end that illustrates what it will look like when the car separates from the spacecraft.

Around or shortly after the Falcon Heavy’s three booster stages touch back down on Earth, the rocket’s payload stage will pop the two halves of the fairing off, exposing the carefully placed Tesla Roadster. Musk and SpaceX have shared a number of photos of the car being prepared to fit where the company’s Dragon spacecraft and customer satellites usually go, but it was unclear until this point whether the car would be wrapped or covered in any other protective material.

That doesn’t seem to be the case. Once it separates, the Roadster will apparently coast, exposed, in a hyperbolic orbit on its way to — and eventually beyond — Mars at around seven miles per second. It should be noted, though, that the animation shows the Roadster getting far closer to Mars than it would actually appear in real life.

As we learned overnight, there will also be a dummy wearing one of SpaceX’s new spacesuits seated in the driver’s seat, and this is shown in the video. But while Musk has said in the past that the car is supposedly going to be playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” the new video is set to “Life on Mars?” (Either way, there is no sound in the vacuum of space.)

Of course, this is all if things go according to plan. While the Falcon Heavy survived a test fire a few weeks ago, this is still its first real flight. Plenty of things could go wrong, and any one of them might be enough to turn this maiden voyage into a giant fireball — something Musk himself has often teased.

If the launch does succeed, sending the Roadster beyond Mars could actually serve a purpose for SpaceX. The Falcon Heavy is capable of sending larger payloads deeper into space than its current Falcon 9 rocket, and so if the company can get it off the ground, new customers could start lining up to take the Roadster’s place.

Whatever the outcome, we’re in for a show. Liftoff is scheduled for 1:30PM ET tomorrow (February 6th) afternoon.