Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, better known as the world’s one true Space Boy, spent Tuesday afternoon shooting a Tesla Roadster into the deep abyss of the universe in a rocket. It was very strange and questionable! So many people questioned the issue, in fact, that it wound up on fact-checking website Snopes.
Aside from the mass, runaway, unsubstantiated internet conspiracy theories claiming Musk “got away with the perfect murder” by launching a massive, multi-million dollar rocket into space, complete with a carbon fiber sports car, and a body, into space (which is, frankly, brilliant, and something I’ll have to consider doing myself for next time), there were people out there who thought the photos and video footage of Musk’s space car and space dummy weren’t real.
Even Snopes was like, “Yeah, this shit was crazy and if you don’t regularly follow the news cycle on Space Boy over there, we can see why you doubted it.” Snopes was a little more eloquent than that.
Here’s part of the Snopes entry, which verified that yes, this is an earth car in space, but unfortunately did not verify what caused Musk’s billionaire midlife crisis that convinced him launch it there in the first place:
If you were to ask us prior to 6 February 2018 if an image of an automobile in space was real, we’d reply, with almost no hesitation, that the photograph was likely a fake. But after that date? Well, there’s a chance that we’d be looking at an authentic image of Tesla Roadster.
A series of images that seemed too fantastical to be real started making their way around the internet shortly after Elon Musk and his company TeslaX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida[.]
These images are real.
Snopes also elaborated on the photos like the one above, which look more like a poster in a kid’s bedroom than screen captures of a live stream from space:
The viral images showing a real Tesla Roadster floating through space are actually screenshots of a live feed taken from cameras mounted on the vehicle. The “astronaut” in the vehicle is actually just a mannequin in a spacesuit dubbed “Starman.”
We at Jalopnik don’t buy this part. There is only one true Starman, and that is Elon Musk, so the only logical conclusion is that he cloned himself and sent the original version into space. We’d send ourselves into space, too, if our company posted a record loss of more than $675 million in the last three months of 2017.
Oh, ouch, that last bit was kind of mean. Can people feel burns in space?