SpaceX

2018viral event / image macroclassic

Published September 28, 2026

SpaceX is Elon Musk's private aerospace company whose February 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight, which launched a cherry-red Tesla Roadster and a spacesuited mannequin into orbit, spawned a wave of image macros, flat-Earth jokes and Bowie tributes across Reddit and Twitter. The launch turned a corporate marketing stunt into one of the most-remixed viral moments of that year.

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Overview

SpaceX itself is a private aerospace company Musk founded in 2002 to lower the cost of spaceflight, with the long-term aim of settling Mars1. The meme side of SpaceX kicked off on February 6, 2018, when the company livestreamed the debut Falcon Heavy flight and used the payload slot for Musk's personal Tesla Roadster, complete with a mannequin nicknamed Starman strapped in the driver's seat2. Onboard cameras beamed back shots of the car drifting against a curved blue Earth, and those frames turned into the raw material for a week of edits.

The recurring formats mostly used the Roadster-in-space photos as a punchline about flat-Earth believers, celebrity comparisons or Musk's own persona3. Reddit gravitated toward image macros that paired the Roadster shot with a still of David Bowie in The Prestige, riffing on Bowie's Space Oddity and Life on Mars3. Twitter jokes leaned on the visible curvature of the Earth in the launch footage to mock flat-Earth theorists4.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube livestream / Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2018

SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center on February 6, 2018, with two side boosters landing back at Cape Canaveral and the center core aiming for a drone ship. The official livestream and the in-space camera feed from the Roadster hit roughly 14 million and 10 million views inside a day and topped YouTube's trending page3. Hours after the launch, Musk told reporters he wanted a 'new space race,' framing the stunt as a challenge to Blue Origin and other rivals1.

The first widely shared meme edit landed the next day. On February 7, 2018, Redditor anemik posted an image macro to /r/funny stacking the Roadster-in-orbit photo above a still of David Bowie from The Prestige3. On the same day, Redditor 99999fives posted a photoshopped Musk tweet to /r/dankmemes in which Musk reacts 'Hold up what the fuck?' to a flat-Earth image and the Illuminati reply 'Delete your account'3.

How It Spread

The Roadster footage moved fastest on Twitter, where a launch-control view of the car in orbit went out over the official SpaceX account and got recirculated with jokes at flat-Earth theorists' expense4. That evening, Twitter Moments compiled the best of those replies under the title 'Did Elon Musk just shut down the Flat Earth conspiracy,' pushing the joke past aerospace fans and into general-timeline territory3.

On Reddit, /r/funny and /r/dankmemes carried the earliest image macros, and /r/OutOfTheLoop got two separate 'why is Elon Musk sending his car to Mars' explainer threads within 24 hours3. Over the following days, more Photoshopped Spaceman edits circulated, plugging the mannequin into unrelated backdrops and pop-culture scenes3.

The meme energy returned on September 13, 2018, when SpaceX tweeted that it had signed the 'world's first private passenger' for a BFR trip around the Moon, pulling more than 18,000 retweets and 66,000 likes in a day3. Musk stoked the guessing game with a lone Japanese flag emoji, and users like YouTuber Dolan Dark jumped in with 'Its me' style replies, while others mocked the tweet's 'everyday people' framing given the ticket price3.

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