It’s not every day we see a car end up in space, but that’s exactly what happened in February 2018 with the first launch of the Falcon Heavy. On board was a Tesla Roadster and a mannequin nicknamed Starman, conceived as a test load for the mission. What is striking is that this was not a simple one-time experiment: over the years, this object has continued its trajectory around the Sun and has once again captured attention for reasons that go beyond the initial spectacle.
What SpaceX sent into space that day was not just a car floating aimlessly, but a technical set designed to validate the behavior of the aforementioned rocket. The mission included the upper stage, the vehicle itself and the Starman dummy, and ended up placing them in a heliocentric orbit after a final maneuver outside of Earth’s gravity. According to NASA, this elliptical trajectory causes the object to move between distances comparable to the orbits of Earth and Mars.
The car that one day looked like an asteroid
The story took an unexpected turn in January 2025. The Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union announced the discovery of a new near-Earth object, identified as 2018 CN41. However, the correction came just a day later: “The orbit coincides with that of the artificial object 2018-017Athe upper stage of the Falcon Heavy with the Tesla Roadster. The 2018 CN41 designation will be removed and omitted,” they said. What seemed like an astronomical find was, in reality, the same car released years ago.
This episode is not only a curious anecdote, it also gives us clues about how sky surveillance works. Systems that track near-Earth objects work by comparing trajectories and observations to identify possible asteroids or comets, and they do so in an environment with tens of thousands of cataloged objects. This helps to understand why an artificial object can, for a brief moment, fit the parameters of a natural one.
If we want to land the story in the present, the question is inevitable: where is that car right now. At the time of writing this article, whereisroadster.com placed the object about 284 million kilometers from Earth, about 214 million kilometers from Mars and about 229 million kilometers from the Sun. According to these calculations, it completes one revolution around the Sun approximately every 557 days and has already traveled more than 6,550 million kilometers since its launch.
It is worth making an important clarification here: we are not seeing the car in real time. The position offered by tools such as the one mentioned is based on orbital models built from data collected after launch and subsequent calculations, not on continuous direct observations. NASA itself points out that the trajectory is adjusted with solutions such as those of the Horizons system, which implies that we are talking about very refined estimates, but not an exact location at all times.
If we look back and forward, his career also leaves some interesting milestones. In 2020, for example, it made a close approach to Mars, passing within about 5 million miles of the planet. And it will not be the last: the US space agency’s forecasts point to new encounters in the coming decades, as a close pass to Mars in 2035 and approaches to Earth in 2047 and 2050, always within margins that do not imply impact.
From there, what remains is the terrain of probabilities and very long-term scenarios. Some studies have attempted to calculate what could happen to the object in millions of years, including the possibility of collisions with Earth, Venus or even the Sun, although with low probabilities and subject to uncertainty. However, long-term predictions could be skewed by factors that are difficult to model, such as thermal radiation or possible uncharacterized degassing accelerations, leaving its final fate open.
Images | SpaceX
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