ELON MUSK has made good on his pledge to launch his personal first-gen Tesla Roadster into space, with the car sent beyond Earth’s atmosphere atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from Cape Canaveral this morning.

It’s astonishing what can be achieved when you’re an eccentric billionaire genius with a space fetish.

As this is the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first launch – a test run – the 1.3-tonne electric sports car was selected to simulate a load of cargo. Launching actual multi-million dollar satellites on a test flight is too risky, but Musk declared the usual ballast of steel or concrete blocks to be “too boring” for the Falcon Heavy’s first run.

But Musk’s Roadster isn’t the first car in space, nor the first electric vehicle. Sitting abandoned on the moon’s surface are three NASA lunar rovers, which were used during the Apollo programme in the 1970s and developed jointly by Boeing and General Motors.