Tesla Sending your Pics to the Moon
Every space nerd grows up wanting to touch the stars in some way. Many of us won’t ever be astronauts, and likely won’t see the age of easy, widely-available space travel; but Tesla is giving some of their customers a way to get up there anyhow.
In 2018, Tesla was running a referral program. Like every other referral program, owners of Tesla products would get a code that they could share with prospective new buyers who would get bonuses like Supercharging credits. The folks putting out their codes would get prizes once they reached certain milestones of referrals. Pretty standard stuff.
One of the prizes was to have the company launch a picture of yours into space. It’s been over four years since the program ended, and there hadn’t been any news from Tesla as to when this could happen. Well, that’s just changed.
“Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy — thank you for your support in making it a reality. Your photo will be launched into space on the KPLO mission on August 4, 2022.”
“KPLO” here refers to the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter mission, an upcoming operation to survey the Moon for water ice and other materials.
Tesla urged participants to enter a photo by June 30th, 2022, but it seems those instructions were sent out in waves with multiple deadlines.
Once they got the images, Tesla reportedly laser-etched them onto glass, and arranged them all to create a mosaic of their 2018 “Starman” photo, where the roadster and SpaceX pressure suit that were launched on the first Falcon Heavy test in 2018 is shown with Earth in the background. The whole arrangement will apparently be shot into a higher orbit during the mission.
That’s not a bad way to get immortalised, really. It’s not the Voyager plates, but someday, someone might find that mosaic and see that you had a really cool haircut. It’s the little things.