Elon Musk shows off the Tesla Roadster he's prepping for space

The rich and famous Elon Musk (He's pretty smart too)

Elon Musk is really sending his Tesla Roadster to Mars.

On Friday (Dec. 22), Musk, the CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX, posted photos to his Instagram account revealing the “midnight cherry” electric sports car being prepared for launch on the company’s first Falcon Heavy rocket.

When Elon Musk revealed his plans for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, he also promised the delivery of his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster to space, all while David Bowie's Space Oddity plays. Not the most subtle of promotions, for sure. Now Musk is teasing us with an even more overblown set of seven photos that show said Roadster prepping to head into orbit near Mars.

Musk notes that rocket payloads for first test flights are generally just things that provide weight to simulate real cargo, like blocks of concrete or steel. He wanted to do something more interesting, so the Falcon Heavy set to launch early next year, which is currently at Cape Canaveral to undergo its final pre-launch tests, is being loaded up with a Tesla Roadster (original flavor, not the just-revealed updated edition).

A Red Car for the Red Planet Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring. Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit.

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Dec 22, 2017 at 10:47am PST