Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launched a Tesla Roadster sports car into the great unknown, atop the company's Falcon Heavy rocket, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Tuesday. After deploying the odd payload, two of the three reusable Falcon boosters returned to earth in a controlled landing, somewhat of a landmark moment for the company and its efforts to reframe space travel.
Fully broadcast on a number of social and video platforms, live footage of the launch taken from the Falcon Heavy showed the Earth's distinct curvature as the craft climbed through the outer atmosphere and into space. No surprise there.
The footage had some on social media wondering: Would it finally shut down flat-Earth truthers for good?
Other users employed sarcasm to respond to the live photos and videos of the Roadster.
Those who believe in the flat-Earth theory contend, despite all available evidence, that the Earth is not the oblate spheroid all observation and mathematics prove it to be. Rather, they see the planet as a thin disk floating in space with the poles forming a ring of ice around the world. They claim that, since the Earth's curvature is not observable at low altitudes, there is no proof the planet is roughly round. Any photographs of the round Earth in full or footage of space launches are, they say, fakes created by a shadowy cabal of scientists.
Given all that, it's unlikely that video from the SpaceX launch will sway a single one of these truthers.
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