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SpaceX Has Received Permission From the US Government To Launch Elon Musk's Car Toward Mars (businessinsider.com)
SpaceX this week is preparing to launch Falcon Heavy, the biggest rocket in the company's history, for the first time. From a report: The 230-foot-tall three-booster launcher is scheduled to blast off Tuesday between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m. ET. SpaceX says Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket in the world. SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, wanted this test launch to happen as early as 2013, though he recently said it could end in an explosion. Instead of putting a standard "mass simulator" or dummy payload atop Falcon Heavy, Musk -- who once launched a wheel of cheese into orbit -- will put his personal 2008 midnight-cherry-red Tesla Roadster on top of the monster rocket. In an Instagram post over the weekend, Musk also revealed that the car would carry a dummy driver, which Musk is calling "Starman," wearing a SpaceX space suit. "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 in December, adding that the company "decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel." However, all rocket payloads need a permit from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch, and Musk's sleek electric car is no exception. The FAA granted SpaceX that permission on Friday in a staunchly formal notice, which Keith Cowing posted on NASA Watch.
Will Musk be in it?
Will it "drive" itself?
Elon Musk is a very popular figure on sites like reddit that "like" technology and science but have very little understanding of it. Every week he says something that either shows what a "down to earth" guy he is, some doomsday prophecy, or announces some pipe dream technology that will never be worked on, and the masses start reposting his every word.
He (or rather his PR team) is very good at creating that "image" and keeping himself popular on reddit, but he's terrible at the thing an enterpreneur is supposed to excel at - generating profits.
So I'm gonna bitch about the super rich. There's no shortage of useful things to send up on a rocket, but we're gonna waste a launch on a dumb stunt by a rich guy. I'm an American, so I don't even have guaranteed health care let alone a robust social safety net, so maybe I'd be a little less bitter if I did. But this sort of nonsense reminds me of the pyramids, the opera houses and other excesses of the ultra wealthy. It's not a good sign to see stuff like this starting to make a comeback.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What is this? An advertisement for something stupid?
Come Elon, where's your ambition? Either launch it TO Mars or not at all, I say!
Is a terrible person.
Send Musk!
To MARS!
Pronto!
What a waste.
Or are they?
Although this one will probably be adrift in space, I just realized that they could claim the title of the fastest car in history since it'll be zooming through space at speeds not possible on land. Too bad it won't be under it's own power.
But not in a Corvette!
Sure 7hat I've
Martians respond; stop dumping your trash on us!
"Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring."
#DeleteFacebook
This isn't some exercise in decadence, it happens all the time. Maiden rocket launches typically carry some sort of useless payload, in order to make sure new rocket actually works before launching expensive useful payloads.
Only difference is, this time the useless payload is car-shaped. Which adds to the "cool" factor and gets the public interested in space.
Elon's rocket thrusts 63,800 Kg into low earth orbit. Back in the 60s, NASA's Saturn V was thrusting it's massive payload of 140,000 Kg into low earth orbit. NASA had a truly magnificent thrusting machine while Elon's flaccid little fire tube is less than half as large and powerful.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
"That seemed extremely boring" - Says the guy who literally founded and runs The Boring Company.
Wish I was there to see it.
I'm glad he is making it fun, that is what science and engineering should be.
No other car company has rockets.
ISS astronauts are still waiting on hearing if the Tesla will use its autopilot. If so they will evacuate immediately to avoid collision.
I'd go in a fucking heartbeat; even if there was a 90% chance it would blow up.
Fuck a roller-coaster, that's a Real Ride!
Godspeed, Starman!!
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Launching a car in to space? Why? What the heck is this saying "Except" Elon Musk can be a complete "Idiot" at times.
;)
Just my 2 cents
It would be better than anything else this decade, with exception being the martian.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
But I'd rather hear Taylor than Gaga, personally.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
I was curios at how Musk's rocket stacked up to the rocket that sent us to the moon. From New Atlas:
the two-stage Falcon Heavy has nine Merlin 1D main engines in each of its first stage elements burning supercooled liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,548,500 lb of thrust. Then the second stage takes over with its single Merlin 1D engine to punch 210,000 lb of thrust
That's remarkable when compared to the Atlas and Ariane rockets of today, but now let's look at the Saturn V. Its S-IC first stage has five Rocketdyne F1 engines that, when set loose, generate a staggering 7,610,000 lb of thrust as it burns kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Then comes the S-II second stage with its five Rocketdyne J-2 putting out 1,155,800 lb of thrust from a mix of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. But where Falcon Heavy has already used up its stages, the Saturn still has its S-IVB third stage and its single J-2 engine that can manage a respectable 225,000 lb of thrust.
Lots of other interesting information in the article such as size of payload and cost.
It's not going anywhere near Mars...it's being put into a heliocentric orbit around the Sun...
Humanity at its finest. We're already polluting another planet for no good reason, and we have yet to set foot on it. And, yes, we have sent toxic shit there before, but those missions had a value other than being pure media stunts.
The pictures show a car mounted in rather emtpy space.
https://www.popularmechanics.c...
I was under impression that a rocket launch is a lot of shake, vibration and gforces. How is a car like that going to survive it and more importantly, would it break apart and cause damage to the launch vehicule? Not to mention the batteries (likely they will discharge them?)
What can go wrong with this idea?
4wdloop
Once the car leaves Earth orbit, it belongs to Mars.
So, technically it will be a Mars Car.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
He didn't ask me
Totof
To all left wondering what "between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m. ET" means: it's 1830-2130 GMT
It just says 'hyperbolic orbit', not where.
I thought this was going to be orbiting the sun in a path nobody is likely to use.
There is no such constraint in the permit.
Cubesats are reported to cost $50,000 to millions. For deep space, the com-system needs to be able to track the earth based receiver, so the low end cost is not going to work. If anyone wanted space available in place of a payload simulator, with less than 50% odds of getting into the desired orbit, i am sure they would have discussed this with space-x.
Odds of getting into a desired orbit are much less that meeting the space-x proof of function task requirements for a first of a model test rocket.
We always suspected he was a Persian cat away from being a supervision. Now I have incontrovertible proof!
He's going to retrieve the Loc-Nar from space.
I've finally got your number now, Musk!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's not easy. It's not glamorous. The stress is intense. You feel like death at least half the time.
Elon zipping around with flamethrowers and his other taxpayer-funded adventures isn't exactly what I would consider a tremendous financial risk.
Payload Dummy second stage (S-4), weighing 25,000 pounds, ballasted with 90,000 pounds, 11,000 gallons of water
Dummy third stage (S-5), weighing 3,000 pounds, ballasted with 100,000 pounds, 12,000 gallons of water
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I mean they don't own the rights to space... Is it because it's being launched through US airspace?
Am I the only one with visions of a mashup of Heavy Metal (the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_KXgFpguE0) and crash test dummies ?
Why not send up some student project cube sats? Yes, we all know that they might blow up, but if they launch.... STEM for the WIN!
This makes me think of the beginning of the movie Heavy Metal.
We really need to hear about flacid rockets from the man with Gypsy Hands,lol
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Just a couple days delay! I'll be in Florida starting on Thursday, and want to see this, dammit!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And if they last more than 3 launches, they can launch the more mass or more volume, even if not the most in a single shot. If they cut the turnaround times down you could get a lot more material into orbit for a lot lower costs too.
>. "Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks.
My understanding is that you can make a simple "pico satellite", or in this case "pico probe" from essentially an Android phone, for a couple hundred dollars on the low end. Launch costs, however, are in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Rather than carrying a concrete dummy load, or a car, why not carry a thousand hobbyist / university experiments? Sure it might not be successful - in which case I've lost my $400 probe, but if it is successful I've saved $40,000 on launch costs. You only need a 1% probability of success to make it worthwhile. I'm probably missing something here?
His car on Mars will collide with one of NASA's robots, and insurances will fight in the court for years!
>> I'm probably missing something here?
Yes,
1) Not enough PR
2) Cost of added complexity and certification costs
3) Infrastructure and support costs (you need a big power supply, ground control infrastructure and manpower, communication at long distance, which require attitude control of the spacecraft, tracking, etcetcetc...)
4) Integration onto/into the spacecraft
5) radiation hardening: this is not your typical LEO cubesat. It goes through intense radiation.
6) Communication bandwidth to mars distances is really really small. Divide that by a thousand experiment, and they become useless.
aaaaaaa
>> it always feel strange when we go "backwards".
That's normal, don't worry.
Civilizations all rise and fall, so id the actual western civilization
aaaaaaa
And given the design of the previous record holder he is only slightly switching the design around replacing a pair of rockets strapped on a car with a car strapped on a triplet of rockets.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So launching a car is fun and all but why not use the launch for some sort of useful scientific instrument instead? Something that might not otherwise get into orbit and do it gratis. Doesn't have to be anything sophisticated or expensive. Sure it might blow up and whoever built the instrument will need to understand that going in but then we aren't wasting a launch on something that even Elon will admit is ridiculous. Is there nothing that weighs a ton that could do something useful if it makes it into space and that we can live with losing if it all goes tits up?
Nobody risks a satellite (which almost always is much more expensive than the rocket that launches it) on the very first launch of a new rocket.
So put some sort of cheap but heavy scientific instrument on board instead. I fail to see the utility in launching dead weight when we could do something useful instead. I'm sure some clever scientist could come up with an experiment that is cheap, useful, and we don't care if it blows up. The risk is understood so you design the payload accordingly.
Geico should "provide car insurance for mars vehicles" and run a joint ad campaign. They could put a "gecko" in the space suit.
There is no communication or science satellite that's so "off the shelf" that it's reasonable to launch it & shrug when it is blown to hell. We don't have them just laying around waiting to be launched.
That doesn't mean we couldn't design something that is cheap and useful. I have a hard time believing that there is absolutely nothing useful we could come up with to launch that is less useful than dead weight.
Useful things that you put on rockets typically are also things that you don't want to explode.
Only if you have an extremely narrow definition of useful. Are you seriously arguing that there is absolutely nothing we couldn't put in the payload bay with more utility than dead weight? Nothing? No simple experiment or device?
No I'm not buying that argument. It doesn't have to be a muilti-million dollar satellite to or probe to be useful.
They aren't "wasting a launch", they are testing a rocket.
Those are orthogonal concepts. You can both waste a launch and test a rocket in the same launch. And that is what they are doing here. So what if the chance of it going BOOM is higher than you want for a pricey satellite? Launch something cheap that you don't care so much if you lose it.
You don't send up a useful payload in a test launch, because it might fail, and useful payloads cost orders of magnitudes more than a $50K used car.
So design a useful payload that costs less than $50K. That shouldn't be a hard problem for a scientist worthy of their PhD. Are you seriously arguing that anything we could design for under the cost of a Tesla car that would have less utility than dead weight?
i.e. this is just a very minor publicity stunt, there are more important things to get angry about.
Who is angry? Just pointing out that it is an opportunity wasted is all.
Testing a launch vehicle that is supposed to launch billion dollar payloads in the future before you put said billion dollar payloads on top of it is not "waste" or "a dumb stunt" or "nonsense", it's the reasonable thing to do.
Who said the payload has to cost a billion dollars? Launch something of equal or lesser value than the car with any amount of scientific utility and you have a net gain. I'm pretty sure we can design a payload that costs very little and still has more utility than dead weight.
You need something sufficiently heavy that someone would be willing to sacrifice.
Yes and? I'm pretty sure that's not a hard problem to solve. Just ask literally every professor on earth for their best proposal. Pretty sure someone can come up with something that would fit the mission parameters and be more useful than dead weight.
Or do you have any payload costing less than several millions (or alternatively are you willing to take the risk of losing more than several millions) and weighing at least two tonnes or so to in order to match the conditions for the planned FH missions? I'm pretty sure SpaceX would have been able to accommodate you if you paid for it.
Why would SpaceX need to charge for it? Especially given the risk of KABOOM? Right now it's just a cost to them to even put dead weight on it. You think that Elon's car was free? It's a sunk cost so it costs SpaceX nothing to put something other than dead weight in place as long as they don't foot the bill. They would be no worse off if they offered to launch something for free to anyone willing to take the risk.
For sale. Cheap. Tesla Roadster 2008. Low mileage. Self pick up from Mars.
You reference a "staunchly formal notice" and where it was posted but can't include a link?
Permit: http://images.spaceref.com/new...
Reference page: http://nasawatch.com/archives/...
"editor".. sheesh
You sound like you have never worked in the space industry. You cannot make a 50K payload that does anything useful.
I call bullshit. You can get the components to build a microsat for $25K so you absolutely could design something to do some task more useful than being dead weight for under $50K. But even if it cost 5X that much it still would be a bargain and much more useful than launching a fracking car. And it certainly wouldn't cost SpaceX a thin dime more than what they are already doing.
Oh and FYI in my day job I am the lead engineer and GM for a company that has made equipment that has been sent into space to the ISS.
Active payload is designed and tested like you wouldn't believe and this alone costs oodles of money.
That is for something that is expected to be reliable. Not necessary to test something to have absurd levels of reliability and safety in this circumstance. It will be lucky to even make it to orbit. The usual expectations don't apply here. You merely would have to do some rudimentary checking to ensure it wouldn't screw up the primary mission (testing the launch vehicle) which doesn't need to cost vast sums.
The fact that you say it shouldn't be a hard problem to come up with a sub 50K payload for any scientist proves to pretty much anyone who has worked in the space industry that you are clueless when it comes to payload development.
You sound like someone who works for a cost+ contractor who cannot imagine that things can be done for less than millions of dollars. I don't have a doubt in my mind that someone could develop some sort of payload to do something scientifically interesting for less money than a luxury car.
That would make me an astronaut, not a suicidal nutjob.
C'mon, this is SlashDot; where the fuck do you think you are, LinkedIn?
rofl
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
In Mission Impossible 52 or Taken 35 or Rocky 2101 or Wonder Woman 29 , the hero(ine) will launch to the Roadster, move Starman to the passenger seat and drive it to the villian's lair where s/he will save the world, no, the universe, at the last second. Of course, Elon Musk will have a cameo as a security guard, bartender, or dog walker to direct the hero(ine) to the right place.
Tickets go on sale immediately after the launch. First 1000 tickets include a tub of buttered popcorn popped with the Boring Co. flame thrower.
Too fake! It's gotta be real since it looks so fake and all. Got to give it this much, it is more believable than any moon mission!