The Tesla Roadster now hurtling through the void is not, strictly speaking, flying. Flying implies purpose, control, and the faint possibility of landing somewhere useful, preferably with the wheels still attached. What Elon Musk achieved in 2018 was rather more ambitious and considerably more American: he took a perfectly good electric sports car, bolted it to the business end of a Falcon Heavy rocket, and flung it into interplanetary space with a mannequin in a spacesuit at the wheel, tuned permanently to David Bowie. The car is currently somewhere between Earth and Mars, doing laps of the solar system like a bored millionaire who has run out of private islands. It is the most expensive piece of space junk in human history, and the most elegant.
One must admire the sheer theatricality of the gesture. While lesser nations debate the precise angle at which a yoghurt pot lid should be recycled, Musk simply decided that the cosmos needed a cherry-red convertible and made it so. The Roadster’s trajectory is eccentric in every sense. It will, according to the orbital mechanics people who still have jobs, spend the next few million years looping past Earth and Mars, occasionally coming close enough for future generations to wave at it through telescopes, provided they still have telescopes and have not been required to tether them to the observatory for safety reasons.
The humour of the enterprise is pure Musk: a mixture of engineering bravado and adolescent showmanship. Starman, the dummy driver, sits there forever in a posture of studied nonchalance, one hand on the wheel, the other presumably scrolling through the universe’s least useful playlist. The car’s battery will eventually die, the paint will fade under unfiltered solar radiation, and the whole ensemble will become a silent monument to the proposition that if you have enough money and enough rockets, the laws of taste can be temporarily suspended. Clive James once observed that the English talent for understatement was matched only by the American talent for overstatement; here the overstatement has achieved escape velocity.
And this, of course, is the real point. Such magnificent absurdities arise only from the particular soil of American free-market capitalism, that unruly garden in which billionaires are allowed to plant rockets the way other people plant hydrangeas. The same system that produces Silicon Valley’s more tiresome excesses also produces the occasional spectacle of a car doing what cars were never meant to do: leave the planet altogether. One may disapprove of the concentration of wealth, the cult of personality, the tweets that read like unfinished ransom notes. One may still find oneself smiling at the image of a Roadster out there among the asteroids, its headlights permanently off, its radio forever silent, embodying the principle that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing in a manner calculated to annoy the European Commission.
Contrast this with the European Union’s crowning technological achievement of recent years: the tethered bottle cap. After years of deliberation, impact assessments, stakeholder consultations, and the solemn weighing of plastic against planetary survival, Brussels succeeded in ensuring that the lid of your mineral water can never again be lost under the car seat. The cap remains attached by a thin plastic hinge, flapping about like a broken wing whenever you try to drink. It is an innovation of pure negation—an improvement that makes the original object slightly worse while congratulating itself on moral progress. One can almost hear the collective sigh of bureaucratic satisfaction as the directive was signed: another small victory for the precautionary principle, another small defeat for the ordinary human desire to open a bottle without a fight.
The same institutional temperament that gave us the tethered bottle top is incapable of producing a car in space. They can’t even take the top off a biro without commissioning eight separate environmental reports to discuss the implications, and even then they would only come to the conclusion that the top needs to be tethered to the pen, making it impossible to write with. The biro itself would then be subjected to a life-cycle analysis, a carbon-footprint audit, and a public consultation on the ethical implications of ink. By the time the process concluded, the pen would be illegal and the only permitted writing instrument would be a recyclable stylus permanently attached to a government-approved tablet that refuses to turn on unless you have completed a GDPR compliance form.
There is something almost poignant in the comparison. America, for all its chaos and inequality, still retains the capacity for grand, slightly ridiculous gestures. Europe, for all its civilisation and social protections, has perfected the art of the small, slightly ridiculous regulation. One launches cars into the heavens; the other makes sure you cannot lose the lid of your lemonade. Both, in their way, are expressions of national character. One dreams of Mars while arguing on Twitter. The other dreams of a perfectly sorted recycling bin while arguing about the precise definition of a single-use plastic. Musk’s Roadster will, in the fullness of geological time, either collide with something interesting or continue its lonely circuit until the sun expands and swallows it. By then the tethered bottle caps of Europe will have long since been replaced by some even more ingenious form of mandatory attachment—perhaps bottle caps tethered to the user, or users tethered to the European Parliament.
In the meantime, the car sails on, a silent rebuke to caution, a chrome-and-leather reminder that sometimes the most civilised thing a civilisation can do is waste a perfectly good sports car on a cosmic practical joke. The rest of us are left down here, struggling with our hinged lids, wondering whether the next great leap for mankind will require planning permission.