All I want for Christmas are these photos of Elon Musk's car preparing to fly to space

Let's light this candle.
 By 
Miriam Kramer
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Do you know what every space nerd wanted for this holiday season? A little gift from Elon Musk and SpaceX.

And we've got it.

Musk, the founder of the private spaceflight company, just posted photos of his midnight cherry Tesla Roadster getting ready to fly to space aboard the first flight of the company's Falcon Heavy rocket in January.

"Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring," Musk said in an Instagram post.

"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."

Musk did hint at the fact that photos of the car-turned-rocket-payload were forthcoming earlier in the week, but the billionaire entrepreneur didn't mention exactly when the photos of the car would be revealed.

Let's just call this a Christmas miracle.

Some folks on Reddit appear to have gotten a little bit jumpy ahead of time, with someone posting what appears to be a photo of the Roadster, though SpaceX hasn't confirmed the validity of that image.

The Falcon Heavy is designed to bring larger payloads to orbit than the company's Falcon 9 rocket. Effectively, the Heavy acts as three Falcon 9s strapped together, allowing it to launch larger payloads and even people to space in the future ... not just cars.

This whole Roadster thing is, admittedly, ludicrous.

The fact that we're even talking about a car literally launching into space on the first flight of a brand-new rocket does sound like something out of a comic book, but hey, now that we're here, let's get into the Christmas spirit.

Thank you for this Christmas present, Mr. Musk. It'll be a nice cap on a very weird and mostly bad 2017.

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Miriam Kramer

Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.

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