The Space Shuttle had a low earth orbit payload capacity of 27,500 kg. Falcon Heavy can launch 63,800 kg to orbit (in fully expendable mode, where they don't recover the stages).

The Shuttle could have carried more payload if it hadn't had to dedicate a lot of capacity to supporting the human being on board.

With rockets, the further you push something, the more energy it takes. Pushing something the size of a car past the orbit of Mars takes a lot more energy than putting a larger satellite in a lower orbit.

- According to wikipedia, the launch mass of the Falcon Heavy is about 26 tons for a geostationnary launch, which is quite a lot and definitely enough for ISS like launches. I guess either the launch mass is way lower for leaving earth's orbit, or either they just wanted to prove they could ship in something of significant mass without having to pay for all the required fuel.

- For Roadster's orbit, most of the time it will be fine, however some have predicted that it will end up crashing on Venus in a few million years [0]. And that makes me wonder whether the Roadster has been properly disinfected (I very much doubt so).

Also, for one of your original questions, the car is completely alone on its orbit, not enclosed in anything. From what I understand [1] the last booster separated itself from the car before burning during re-entry. You can see clear and beautiful pictures of the car around Earth [2]. Edit : I was wrong, the car is still attached to the last booster. See [3]

[0]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/15/orbital_calculation...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/space-oddity...

[2]: https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/falco...

[3]: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/25016/what-all-is-...

Orbit is an eccentric one around the Sun. Perigee (innermost point of orbit) is about Earth's orbit, apogee (outermost point) was hoped for at least Mars' orbit, ended up out in the asteroid belt well past Mars.

> i mean thats great but i would have expected a much bigger mass for a fully functional satellite.

Iridium sats are 700kg each, GEOsats are also less than that.

The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope's launch/payload mass is 6 200 kg.

The Falcon Heavy can push 1 400 000 kg, and 16 800 kg of that can be payload. To Mars.