Don't Panic

Without giving anything away, I already read about this part in our history.  In Neal Stephenson's book, Seveneves, Stephenson writes about minor-character Sean Probst launching a successful commercial space transport business.  Without going into details and ruining the Sci-Fi novel for you, he's incredibly successful, rich, and attempts to save the day after becoming impatient with federal agencies ability to "do something" about their ability to address the Earth's immediate space needs.  Similarities to some of our space-age billionaires (Sean Parker, Bezos, Elon Musk) are extraordinary, and likely, intended.

Back to real life, and Elon Musk's SpaceX was able to launch a rocket able to carry payloads of up to 140,700 lbs...which made his launching a Tesla Coupe (roughly 2,900 lbs) a piece of cake.  In one of the most amazing feats, SpaceX was able to retrieve two out of three of the booster rockets that pushed the Falcon Heavy rocket into low orbit and beyond on February 6 around 3:45pm EST.  Yeah, the third one, which was scheduled to land on an autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) 300 miles off the coast of Florida had a landing booboo.  Where the first two stage-1 rockets not only flew back and successfully landed upright on landing pads at Cape Canaveral, the center core booster failed to initiate slowing burns and is probably at the ocean floor after hitting the surface of the water at 300 miles per hour.  Whoops. 

Still, an amazing feet.  As if the successful deployment and retrieval of 66% of the rockets wasn't enough, the Tesla Coupe payload is meant to eventually orbit Mars and then continue to circle the sun for, potentially, billions of years.  However, in addition to the core's apparent demise, team SpaceX overshot their orbit due to an unplanned elongated burn which pushed the Tesla and the Starman (the propped mannequin in a spacesuit "driving" the car) past its intentional orbit.  It seems that, based on new calculations, it'll pass "nearby" Earth in 2021 at about 28 million miles away, but mostly linger alone in the void of space for near-eternity. 

But, forget all that.  What I'm geeking out about is that, when the Tesla was first exposed to space, the launch center turned on its audio.  Apparently, the car is blasting David Bowie's "Life on Mars" track, which was played back on Earth during the launch.  The naming of the mannequin, StarMan is also a Bowie reference.  I love me some Bowie.  In the center console, there's a sign which is dear to my heart: "Don't Panic," which is a direct reference to Douglas Adam's most popular book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  And, if that's not enough, SpaceX included at least one more easter egg.

A company named Arch Mission (pronounced Ark) is dedicated to archiving human knowledge for thousands and thousands of years.  To do so, they've adopted a technology where quartz silica disks, permanently etched by a special type of laser, allow the disk to carry up to 360 terabytes of information.  On the disks included in this launch, Arch Mission included the text of Issac Asimov's Foundation series.  Why?  Because they're awesome!  The Foundation series original trilogy spans thousands of years in three distinctive yet interrelated novels.  Then, there are a number of prequels and sequels.  But, the premise is that this Tesla, destined to orbit our sun for the rest of our lives and generations to come is carrying texts that may foretell our futures through the eyes of 1950's science fiction where the story's timeline spans eons.  That's super nerdy and super cool. 

Who knows if sentient beings will be able to retrieve the Tesla within it's projected  lifetime: millions of years.  But, if they do, let's hope they'll be able to decode the Arch disk books to see what we were going for.  But, I do know that thanks to Elon Musk, and the money he and other billionaires feed into our national space program, some of our legacy as the human race will be preserved for eternity...which is good, because, if Seveneves is accurate, we've got a moon to worry about and a space station to build (for additional reference, see Ron Howard in 2019 for the movie adaptation; the future is just a minute away...or a year or so).