A Rochdale man has become the first Rochdale resident to go into space.

Ted Skeat, 48 achieved the feat by tailgating a Tesla car on the back of a rocket Elon Musk sent into space this week.

A spokesman for SpaceX said, “We got this strange signal just after takeoff. We thought it might be space debris or aliens. When we turned the camera around we saw a black Audi flashing its headlights at us. After 27,000 miles it undertook us on the approach to low Earth orbit. As it came past the driver could be seen waving his hands and calling us wankers. He wasn’t even indicating.”

Ted Skeat said, “I don’t care if you are driving the most powerful privately built rocket in the history of space travel. If you’re in front of me I’m overtaking you.”

 

Fact checked by Snopes; Plagiarised by Andrew Neil; Nancy Sinatra's favourite Rochdale satirist; sued by Chris Froome and winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.* *Not all of these necessarily true.