What I want to know is if the ship has solar panels or just batteries that will shortly run out.
It’s sending back at least 1 1080p video signal, maybe 5 or 6, likely full telemetry, other data as well.
If the feed can keep going we can watch the earth get smaller and smaller as the days and weeks go on. No other spacecraft has allowed that view, live.
Most of the landers and probes out there probably don’t even have imagers as good as all the goPros slapped on that sucker, who knows what kind of science, citizen science, we can do.
Here’s a quick one for a physicist out there: We know the camera imager specs, we know the composition of the windshield glass, we know the solar spectrum; what can we find out from the spectral reflection of the light off the windshield?
Honestly, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
None of America’s “chronically underfunded” space scientists wanted to risk their (generally multi-year, multi-million-dollar) investment in a science payload on a rocket that even the perpetually-optimistic company founder thought had about 50/50 odds of blowing up spectacularly.
Well, since he’s using the NASA spaceflight model, he’s obviously a deluded globist just like NASA.
(Acto mainstream flat-earthism, NASA isn’t hiding the fact that the earth is flat; they just don’t know any better, since, like most of the population, they’re deluded globists. But all space travel (incl. SpaceX) is faked, and they make the fakery to match the globist paradigm, because they honestly believe it would work that way if it weren’t fake.)
Just batteries. They were expected to last for about 12 hour max.
Making it capable of continuous interplanetary livestreaming would have been way more difficult. You’d need deployable solar panels, a much more powerful transceiver with a steerable high-gain antenna, and likely some sort of radiator to dump the heat from the electronics. Plus, you would need government support in the form of the Deep Space Network, to use for earth stations.
It becomes a much, much more complicated problem.
And then the deep-space radiation environment will likely kill the cameras or other electronics over a fairly short time period.
Space is hard. Most real science payloads cost far more to build and operate than they do to launch (sometimes by orders of magnitude) so “free rocket ride” may not be as attractive an offer as some here seem to be imagining, especially at 50/50 odds.
Been running for >24 hrs now. I wonder if it’s running off the car’s battery?
Been watching on my second monitor for a while now, showing the night side of the earth, can make out some city lights and definitely lightning in thunderstorms, really freaking cool.
I believe Elon Musk said in a recent interview that it can’t be fake 'cause it totally looks fake. The CGI we have these days could make it look way more ‘real’
AFAIK, the livestream ended just before the final orbital insertion burn, after about 6 hrs. of coasting. Some secondary sources may be looping the available 4+hrs. of “Starman” stream, but I don’t think there’s any more actual livestreaming happening. (I would love to be wrong!)
It was described as running on “a Tesla battery”, but I don’t know if that’s just the car’s own battery, or if they stuck some Powerwall packs in the Payload adapter. But the car’s battery is much bigger (53 kwh vs. 13 kwh), so, me, I’d probably just use the car battery.
Why not? It’s a good-sized battery, unless they removed it because it wasn’t vacuum-rated?
I imagine a team went over that car, stripping out all sorts of stuff that might be nasty in space, like the air-bag charges, wind-shield washer fluid, empty the tires and spare, air-conditioning fluid…
Really? You think that all this can be done without science? That an attempt to colonise another planet can’t be done without quite a lot of exploration?
While it is, indeed, a mannequin up there, the suit isn’t “fake”, it’s the suit they’ll be using for Crew Dragon flights in the future, waiting to be human-rated.
You are misunderstanding what I’m trying to say, please don’t be condescending.
Science and engineering are not the same thing, Musk’s projects are great on an engineering point of view but on a scientific point of view it’s kind of useless.
He do not bring any data or observations to the scientific community.
Throwing stuff in space is not enough to make science, you have to make observations, have protocols, bring instruments, make hypothesis, etc.
The question of the Mars colonisation shouldn’t even be on the table before its exploration, by robots or humans.
Are we ready ? Is there a risk of contamination of Mars by our bacteria ? And is it even a good idea ?
Musk does not ask himself those questions because he think it’s cool. Again, nothing wrong with that in itself but to me he is not as interesting as Sagan or any major space exploration figure on a scientific point of view.
Tesla has earned 5 billion in tax cuts and grants. Musk’s business model is focused on subsidy. How do you argue against those facts (other than calling people names)?
