From Business Insider:
Instead of putting a standard "mass simulator" or dummy payload atop Falcon Heavy, Musk — who once launched a wheel of cheese into orbit — will put his personal 2008 midnight-cherry-red Tesla Roadster on top of the monster rocket.
In an Instagram post over the weekend, Musk also revealed that the car would carry a dummy driver, which Musk is calling "Starman," wearing a SpaceX space suit.
"Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring," Musk said in an Instagram post in December, adding that the company "decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel."Oh, man, I'd forgotten about the cheese...
Now, I'm not saying that everything Elon Musk does is necessarily wise, or good, or even (in some cases) entirely legal, but it sure does look like he's having fun doing it all, doesn't it? Seriously, I'm not sure that it would even occur to me to sell US$500 Boring Company-branded flamethrowers (in California, natch, and after the wild fire season they've just had), or to start digging a tunnel from my house to my office (whether or not local regulations actually allow for that sort of thing) just because commuting sucks, but Musk not only thinks of these things, he goes ahead and does them, and damn the torpedoes.
In a world of carefully-crafted PR strategies, where every aspect of everything a big corporation does is run past both PR and legal before daring to show its boring, homogenized face to the world, the sheer fuck-you exuberance of half of what Musk does is just so... refreshing. And fun, dammit. Selling flamethrowers because why not? and then launching your own sports car into space is just giddy, childish fun. Even if it is somewhat irresponsible. Musk has succeeded in making private-sector space launches a thing, he's succeeded in making electric cars a thing, he's helping to make cleaner energy storage a thing, and he's living like a comic book superhero's secret identity at the same time.