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What about Voyager? I don't understand why you're so heated up about it... What about all those pesky satellites cluttering up Earth's orbit, should they all be pointed at the sun as well?

yeah i don't get the argument that space exploration and feeding people are mutually exclusive.

The deltaV needed to get from Mars to the sun would require fuel several orders of magnitude more than is curently being used, and several orders of magnitude more mass than the car.*

Have the car orbit Mars for a few hundred years, to then become a monument to man's endeavours / folly.

Or spunk thousands of tonnes of fuel into space (kinda littering it a bit) to drop it into the Sun.

* and no, I've not done the maths

It’s not actually going to orbit Mars though is it? I thought it’s just in a massive sun orbit that takes it close to mars.

What about Voyager?

Doing science, not just an advert.

I don't understand why you're so heated up about it...

Because there is masses of space junk about and some orbits are going to become unusable. Our past habits of dumping stuff in the sea have polluted the oceans, space is next on our list of places to trash. If we want a future in space we should look after our corner now.

What about all those pesky satellites cluttering up Earth's orbit, should they all be pointed at the sun as well?

They do something useful now and when they are spent they are mostly deorbited and burn up in the atmosphere.

It does look like a monument to his ego more than anything else. The entire Musk thing feels like the backstory to a dystopic scifi cult.

i'm just amazed he hasn't been fingered in some sort of sex pest scandal yet... i mean... look at that hair...

Bro, don't you even?

Unlike the oceans there's no ecology or anything in space. As long as you don't bash into the junk when you're flying around it's all literally harmless.

just read tesla are due to release their quarterly numbers tomorrow, losses up to $1bn

makes you wonder about the launch date and the car in space, it's a nice distraction

You don't pay tax on a loss. Just saying.

how can people say sending useless junk into space is harmless
what if everybody sent a tesla into space

What if it damages the magic space mushrooms?

what if everybody sent a tesla into space

Tesla's profits would go up?

I'd be pretty happy if i owned a rocket.

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Where are they going to charge it? The infrastructure just isn't ready to go electric.

Probably more chance of finding a charge point than there is in where I live though

won't somebody think of the elephants standing on the world turtle

Space junk is absolutely a thing and something to be concerned about but it's almost entirely limited to low earth orbit. There's too much shite orbiting our planet and every time something smashes up there, there's lots more little bits. At some point it's going to become a huge issue just leaving the atmosphere without hitting anything.

This is what a fleck of paint does to a space shuttle window:

The Falcon Heavy is so far out of anybody's way it won't ever be an issue but don't be surprised to see Elon driving it again in a few years.

They also exceeded the planned orbit (to get out as far as Mars) and it's now on its way to the asteroid belt.

bumping into some of said asteroids knocking them out of a well established orbit and into the path of earth

he's killed us all, how long have we got ?

If we sent 7 billion Teslas in to Solar orbits, the chance of ever colliding with one would still be astronomically small.

Fuck the cosmos. What has it ever done for us?

It's actually trying to kill us in the face every single fucking day...

It was a test, they'd normally send up a one ton slab of concrete, I think this is a bit more fun, don't you? And why wouldn't he use the opportunity to market his other business?

Pretty much this. Although water has been used as a dummy load in the past and obviously that would be lower impact. As everyone else just said the car hasn't gone into Earth orbit (where the real problem with space junk is) it's gone on a solar orbit roughly in the direction of Mars. This from Space.com:

"He is shipping it out of Earth orbit, so I do not think that there is any risk here," said orbital-debris expert Darren McKnight, technical director for Integrity Applications in Chantilly, Virginia. "The enthusiasm and interest that he generates more than offsets the infinitesimally small 'littering' of the cosmos."

However, McKnight said "it is [a] huge waste of a beautiful car, so I would be happy to take the brand-new red Tesla off his hands, and he can send my five-year old silver Prius into space."

Musk has said it will be up their for a billion years but this is highly unlikely, if micrometeorites don't get it and it doesn't end up being sucked too close to Mars and crash into it radiation is likely to destroy it:
https://www.livescience.com/61680-will-spacex-roadster-survive-in-space.html

From a business point of view I can absolutely see why Musk did this. Sure it's great PR for Tesla but you have to remember that in 2008 both Tesla and SpaceX nearly ran out of money. What saved both businesses (because Musk couldn't choose which one he wanted to save) was the NASA resupply contract SpaceX won on Christmas Eve 2008. After Tesla investors had effectively heavily subsidised SpaceX.

There's a good Bloomberg report on this and the history of SpaceX. Long mind...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-elon-musk-spacex/

Cosmos eunt domus!