CRAP CAR
IN SPACE.
WE ARE NOT
DISCUSSING THIS.

There is a car in space. A red car. A Tesla Roadster. Belonging to the man who owns the rocket company that launched it. His own car. In space. Driven by a mannequin in a spacesuit. Called Starman. With David Bowie playing on the stereo. In the vacuum of space. Where there is no air. Where sound cannot travel. Where a stereo is, by definition, completely pointless.

We are not going to discuss how badly faked this is. We said we weren't going to discuss it and we are not going to discuss it. We are simply going to present the facts and allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. The facts are: there is a car in space. It has a driver. The driver is a mannequin. The mannequin is wearing a spacesuit. The spacesuit has the company logo on it. The company is the one that launched the car. We are not saying anything. We are just noting the facts.

Space Life by David Bowie. Is Don't You (Forget About Me). Is Space Oddity. The reports vary. The point is: music. Playing. In space. On a car stereo. In a vacuum. Where the speed of sound is zero. Where there are no air molecules to vibrate. Where the concept of 'playing music' is, from a physics standpoint, entirely meaningless.

We have looked into this. The establishment explanation is that the stereo was playing when the car was launched and continued playing until the battery died. This is the explanation. A car battery. In space. Running a stereo. For no one. Because the driver is a mannequin. And the mannequin cannot hear. Because there is no sound. Because there is no air. We are not going to discuss this. We said we weren't going to discuss it. We are not discussing it.

The mannequin is called Starman. He is wearing a SpaceX spacesuit. He is sitting in the driver's seat of a Tesla Roadster. His hand is on the wheel. He is, by all accounts, very relaxed about the situation. He has been in space since February 2018. He is currently somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars. He has not complained. He has not asked to come home. He has not, to our knowledge, requested a comfort break. We find this suspicious.

FakeX has reviewed the available evidence on Starman's current trajectory. According to the tracking website whereisroadster.com — which is a real website that exists — Starman has now travelled over 4 billion kilometres. He has completed multiple orbits of the Sun. He is, by any measure, the most well-travelled mannequin in history. He has exceeded the mileage warranty on the Roadster by approximately 3,999,999,960,000 kilometres. We do not know if Tesla will honour the warranty. We suspect not.

There is a message on the dashboard. It reads: DON'T PANIC. This is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It is a joke. There is a joke on the dashboard of a car that is allegedly in space. A joke. On a dashboard. In space. Where no one can see it. Except the mannequin. Who cannot read. Because he is a mannequin.

We have spent considerable time thinking about the dashboard message. We have thought about who put it there. We have thought about why they put it there. We have thought about the sequence of events that leads to a person deciding to put a Hitchhiker's Guide reference on the dashboard of a car they are about to launch into space. We have not reached a satisfactory conclusion. We are not going to discuss what conclusion we have reached. We said we weren't going to discuss it.

The Roadster was launched on the Falcon Heavy test flight in February 2018. The stated purpose of the test flight was to test the Falcon Heavy rocket. The payload for a test flight is typically a mass simulator — a block of concrete, essentially, or a steel plate. Something heavy and cheap that approximates the weight of a real payload. The man who owns the company decided instead to use his own car. His personal vehicle. A £200,000 sports car. As a mass simulator. For a rocket test.

The car is now in a heliocentric orbit that takes it between the orbits of Earth and Mars. It will remain in this orbit for millions of years. It will eventually either collide with Earth, collide with Venus, or fall into the Sun. These are the three options. A car. Colliding with Earth. In millions of years. Because someone decided not to use a block of concrete. We are not going to discuss this. We are simply noting it for the record.

The footage of the Roadster in space was broadcast live. There were multiple cameras. There was the car, floating in space, with Earth visible behind it. There was the mannequin, sitting in the driver's seat, hand on the wheel, visor down. There was the curvature of the Earth. There was the blackness of space. There was David Bowie.

FakeX has watched this footage. We have watched it many times. We have watched it frame by frame. We have noted the lighting. We have noted the shadows. We have noted the way the car rotates slowly in the vacuum. We have noted the Earth in the background. We have noted all of these things very carefully. We are not going to say what we noticed. We said we weren't going to discuss it. We are a professional organisation. We are simply going to say that we have watched the footage, we have noted several things, and we are not going to discuss them. The reader may draw their own conclusions.

FakeX does not have a car. We have a 2009 Ford Transit with a cracked windscreen and a passenger door that only opens from the outside. We have considered putting it in space. We have looked at the cost of putting it in space. We have decided against putting it in space. We will continue to use it for transporting the 3.3-Stage Rocket to the launch site, which is the car park behind the facility.

We are not saying the Tesla in space is fake. We are not saying that. We said we weren't going to discuss it and we are not going to discuss it. We are simply saying that if we were going to fake a car in space, we would not have put a joke on the dashboard, we would not have named the mannequin, we would not have played David Bowie on a stereo in a vacuum, and we would absolutely have used a block of concrete for the test flight like a normal person. These are our only comments. We have no further comments. We are not discussing this.