The future of the Falcon Heavy and the BFR

More detailed read on the coolest thing exploding happening this week. Worth reading in its entirety for the enthusiast, but here are the bits I found most interesting :

On the prospect of the car contaminating Mars with its disgusting human germs :

And it's going to be in a processing elliptical orbit, with one part of the ellipse being at Earth orbit, the other part being at Mars orbit. So it'll essentially be an Earth-Mars cycler. And we estimate it'll be in that orbit for several hundred million years, maybe in excess of a billion years. At times it will come extremely close to Mars, and there's a tiny, tiny chance it'll hit Mars.
Alan Boyle, GeekWire: Have you quantified that?
Elon Musk: Extremely tiny.

On the crewed use of Falcon Heavy having dropped off the radar in favour of BFR :

Yeah. What we decided internally is to focus our future efforts on BFR. Now we'll see how the BFR development goes. If that ends up taking longer than expected, then we'll return to the idea of sending a Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy around the Moon. And potentially doing other things with crew on Falcon Heavy. But right now it looks like BFR development is moving quickly and it will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed spaceflight. We could be ready to do short hops of the spaceship portion of BFR. BFR essentially consists of a giant booster and a giant spaceship... So our focus is on the ship, and we expect to hopefully do short flights on the ship, with the ship next year. You know, aspirational.

Later he continues :

Falcon Heavy is absolutely capable of sending a Crew Dragon, Dragon version 2 that's under development and that we'll fly later this year for NASA. With a single stick Falcon 9, it's easy for us to do Low Earth Orbit missions, or Medium Earth Orbit missions, and then as soon as you add Falcon Heavy on, we can toss Dragon way past the moon. It's actually further than we went with Apollo. Possibly even visit an asteroid or something like that. That was our plan until last year. Then we though, you know, maybe we can make this BFR development go faster than we thought, and if that's true, there won't be much point in qualifying Falcon Heavy for launching Dragon, making it fully man-rated. So we kind of tabled the crewed Dragon on Falcon Heavy in favor of focusing our energies on BFR.

Finally, on the car :

Yeah, so there's three cameras on the Roadster. And there's going to be a bunch of sensors on the upper stage, so we'll get a lot of data back. But, I mean the most fun stuff will be the three cameras that are mounted on the Roadster. They should really provide some epic views if they work.

And if it doesn't explode, presumably. Or maybe some REALLY epic views for a fraction of a second.

https://gist.github.com/theinternetftw/189852a3081eed7f695b80f374b8a727