Twitter | @dflieb

The Car Elon Musk Put Into Space Has Found Its Way Around The Sun

With how fast news travels nowadays, it seems that some things have everybody talking for a few days only to be pushed aside when the next trending topic du jour comes along.

And even in the cases where we actually remember talking about certain events hitting the news cycle, we don't often check up on them later. Once we get tired of making memes about it, we can only shrug our shoulders when someone asks us what happened to them.

Sometimes, however, we'll find that a couple of people kept track of a particular curiosity long after we became distracted. And one of those people just gave us an update on a car many of us haven't thought about for a year-and-a-half.

Back in February of 2018, Elon Musk's SpaceX company launched a rocket known as a Falcon Heavy.

YouTube | SpaceX

As Vox reported, this was the most powerful rocket in the world and could launch up to 140,000 pounds of payload into low orbit.

However, this rocket wasn't carrying a payload anywhere near that heavy.

Reddit | frenzy3

Instead, its mission was to launch a red Tesla Roadster and its dummy pilot, Starman, into Mars' orbit.

According to Vox, it ended up overshooting and heading towards the asteroid belt.

And yet, that didn't seem to put it out of commission.

Twitter | @dflieb

As the website whereisroadster.com discovered, the flying car has achieved a full orbit around the sun in the year-and-a-half since launching and is now moving away from it at a speed of 1,132 miles per hour.

This means it has now traveled far enough to have driven all the roads in the world almost 34 times over.

Amusingly, this also means it has exceeded its 36,000 mile warranty more than 21,000 times over.

YouTube | ucara 14

And since this "Starman" was equipped with headphones that constantly play David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in one ear and his song "Life On Mars?" in the other, this means he's listened to the former 151,902 times and the latter 204,682 times.

That's assuming the battery still works, of course.

h/t: whereisroadster.com