A SpaceX rocket has transported a car to space. Seems about time for Tesla to return the favor.
Does towing a dragon capsule count?
How about a starlink satellite (complete with its hall thrusters so that it at least has a form of rocket propulsion)?
@ahalekelly Needs to be a whole rocket. The Tesla stunt would have been much less impressive if it were just a fender or something.
@IsaacKing Space Shuttle was transported without the fuel tank or boosters, that's roughly equivalent to transporting just the second stage + payload fairings of the Falcon 9. Each booster weighed 5x as much as the shuttle, the shuttle itself was only 5% of the total wet mass of the shuttle system.
SpaceX only has plans to make bigger rockets, not smaller. Starship can only be transported by barge, it's far too wide for the road. I would put the odds of SpaceX making a smaller rocket by 2029 at around 1%. And even just the two halves of the Falcon 9 fairing assembled are too wide for a road.
Maybe they could tow the transporter-erector the couple hundred feet from the final assembly building to the launch pad with a Tesla Semi, I suppose that would qualify?
@ahalekelly Yeah I'd count something like that. As long as one or more Tesla vehicles are providing the majority of the power and traction that's moving the rocket, that's good enough.