Flux capacitor?
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I cheered when Falcon Heavy cleared the tower without exploding. Watching those two boosters do the simultaneous landing just floored me. Once it made it past max Q, I figured it was going to be an overall success, and it turned out to be a turn-it-up-to-11 smashing success at that.
I wish I could have been at Kerbal Kennedy Space Center to see it in person, though.
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Or not.
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You’re missing a step here. SpaceX is not a scientific research organization. They’re a commercial orbital launch services provider.
What they bring is space launch for anyone — commercial comm-sat operators, orbital internet providers, NASA scientists, defense recon observers, NOAA weather satellites, satellite mappers, and other foreign scientists; and they’re delivering tons of cargo to, as well as returning a wealth of bio samples from, the ISS —and all of this at less than HALF the price that other providers charge.
Indeed, the NASA cargo transport to the ISS alone would have cost easily 10 times as much if NASA had built its own bespoke systems. Every time a NASA ISS cargo mission or science satellite flies aboard a SpaceX rocket, the US government saves millions — sometimes hundreds of millions — of dollars.
Every. Single. Flight.
They’re making it possible to do a lot more science for a lot less money. That’s what they bring to science. More earth-science monitoring. More deep-space exploration. More of any space-based science. For less money.
In fact, they’re enabling a lot more of everything rocket-related for a lot less money. That’s what they bring to commerce, to communications, to navigation and rescue, and on and on and on.
And the commercial competition from SpaceX has led to frantic efforts by other space launch providers to catch up. They’re doing everything they can think of to make their systems cheaper, in order to compete with SpaceX.
So even non-SpaceX customers benefit from lower launch prices.
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According to Ars Technica, who got it from Elon Musk, “The Tesla will pass the orbit of Mars and approach the asteroid belt.” So if I understand correctly, it’ll have its own orbit around the sun.
(Sending the car up was admittedly a good piece of marketing.)
Hmm. When Apollo 8 was sent to the Moon, they didn’t have a Lunar Module with them because it wasn’t ready yet. (Good thing they didn’t have Apollo XIII’s accident or it would have been fatal.)
I wonder what was packed in the third stage in its place? It couldn’t have been empty. They needed something the same size and mass to test anti-pogo fixes on the first stage.
It looks like it was this: “The LTA (Lunar Module Test Article) has the same weight as the Lunar Module used at later missions.” So there’s no 1969 Corvette in solar orbit. Pity.
It seemed to me that the Falcon Heavy was quicker off the pad than a Saturn V, but it’s been a while since I watched a Saturn launch.
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Ok - it’s a neat stunt. Well done.
Now how about getting back to trying to mass produce affordable high quality BEVs?
I’m starting to think this, the hyperloop, the flame throwers, the electric semis are all misdirections. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misdirection_(magic)
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“Sith”?! Lord.
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And the Tesla roadster’s stereo system plays Bowie because Bowie played Tesla (“The Prestige”).
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I know that and I never tried to undermine the economic or engineering achievement of SpaceX.
I was specifically talking about this launch, its symbolic impact and Elon Musk vision of space exploration (witch is more space conquest/colonisation than exploration).
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It would have made more sense for him to drive a Ford though.
What with them being the dominant form of life on Earth…
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Can’t build that B Ark soon enough
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Is it though? How so? What are we going to conquer or colonize or even explore?
I don’t mean to be a ‘flat-earther’ about it, but please do some math. Where can we go that we don’t need to bring everything with us? How soon could we be ready to go there? Assuming it’s even plausible, what will here look like by then, will it have already not been habitable for millennia or ages???
I think this is all a dangerous waste of talent. We really have to -stop- using so much energy, inside the atmosphere. All of us. ASAP. Leaving is a nice dream, but there’s currently nowhere to go but fantasyland. send more robots and lets look around this place, sure, but we’re not going anywhere.
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A good example is the Antarctic. We explore the arctic but don’t colonise it.
We study it but don’t exploit it. And because of that we learn a lot of stuff from climate, geology and earth history. And it is (like space) a fantastic place for international cooperation.
I’m not against space colonisation but is it a harder question than we think, scientist don’t all agree on the how but also on the why we should do it.
I wish we already were colonising, be we still are in the age of cautious and methodic exploration. We have to be patient to not doing it wrong and bringing all the bad habits and thinking we have on Earth. Going to far to quickly could put an end to all those efforts.
The Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy have some interesting debates around the questions of colonisation and terraforming.
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but that’s here. So it’s not a good example.
That’s not an apt analogy. At all. As, un-like space, Antartica IS A PLACE. Space is literally not a place. Name a place in space we’re going, to go live. Ever.
You can debate religious belief endlessly. We don’t have the science you’re counting on, we won’t in any realistic timeframe.
To me, with a love of this environment, this whole thing seems like wankery. That is NOT to call you a name, I just see any aspect of the space race which is contingent on the human race leaving planet earth for good - is a grift. And Musk’s vision is that. And it’s a waste. And a manipulation of the dreams of the well intentioned. A Grift.
Oh my god you’re right. He’s Andy Kauffman!
More seriously, it’s not like Musk has written his name in GOLD on tall buildings all over the world. He launched his old car into space, which IS a neat trick.
