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SpaceX's Starman and Elon Musk's Tesla just made their 1st Mars flyby:
Starman just cruised by Mars for the first time.
The spacesuit-clad mannequin is "driving" SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, which launched in February 2018 on the debut flight of the company's powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. And the duo just hit a big milestone on their cosmic journey.
"Starman, last seen leaving Earth, made its first close approach with Mars today — within 0.05 astronomical units, or under 5 million miles, of the Red Planet," SpaceX announced via Twitter Wednesday (Oct. 7). (One astronomical unit is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)
[...] Starman and the Roadster circle the sun once every 557 Earth days, according to the tracking site whereisroadster.com. As of today, car and driver have covered nearly 1.3 billion miles (2.1 billion km) in space — far enough to drive all of the roads on Earth more than 57 times over, whereisroadster.com calculated.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2020, @04:00AM (10 children)
They could have loaded that rocket up with a zillion cubesats or larger payloads from folks who could afford to build a satellite or probe, but couldn't afford the launch. With 2-3 years advanced notice, there would have been plenty ready to act as a high risk of loss payload for the test launch.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 10 2020, @07:48AM (4 children)
yes yes, let's load tens of millions dollars worth of equipment on a test flight instead of a car that failed inspection and is ready to be trashed. oh, your solution is not to have the test flight, and instead "wait 2-3 years" so a test flight is not needed for the cubesats, and we'll send the test flight instead with some cement for weight. you're a fucking genie my man.
There's no starman waiting for the sky
He'd like to launch on space x
But you think he'd blow up in your mind
But a cubesat flying in the sky
You told us not to blow it
Cause with cubesats it's worthwhile
retard
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2020, @05:46PM (3 children)
There isn't a university in the entire world that wouldn't have been waiting in line for a free launch of their student project cubesats.
Amateur radio folks also would have been lining up to get repeaters into orbit.
They probably might have had some commercial payloads too from bootstrapping companies, if they opened it up for that.
When the cost of the above satellites is less than the cost of launching said satellite. It is a no-brainer to go with a high-risk launch. The argument only becomes stronger when you consider that most of the above satellites will never be launched otherwise.
Sending up trash was a complete waste.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 10 2020, @07:20PM
oh right, let's test a bunch of random shit to make sure it's safe, doesn't leak em, can deal with pressure changes, can deal with radiation without leaking and exploding. test flights are not launched with random shit in them. they need to be a very tightly controlled and known environment, so you're testing the thing you're testing, without a bunch of random variables. and let's not forget what you literally said:
wait several years and do a bunch of test flights to make sure it works, then launch the cube sats. you didn't realize this was a test flight. now you're changing your story and moving the goalposts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @02:09AM (1 child)
Are there really thousands of ready to go cubesats sitting all over the world waiting for a launch?
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday October 12 2020, @10:37PM
Well, to the guys point, there could be - supply creates demand. But let's look at the full conditions of what creating that supply would mean: to replace the cement brick used for test launches, with sats. It means a testing criteria for each sat, costing tens of thousands of dollars for each sat. It also means if the sat caused a crash, such as exploding during decompression/heat/acceleration, or leaking some shit and causing a failed test - it would also mean tens of thousands spent on insurance for the launch, per sat. So now your cubesat for a test launch costs a couple of hundred thousand more than the cost of the item. So now you're back to launching a cement brick instead to test the rocket, or a gutted car.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday October 10 2020, @12:11PM
Sorry, the rocket was going to be sent up with deadweight anyway like a cement blob. A successful car ad was a really good use of the payload space.
They didn't need 2-3 years advanced notice for the Tesla.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday October 10 2020, @12:57PM (3 children)
I doubt many would have wished to gamble their satellites in such a manner - normally if a launch fails insurance covers the cost of replacement - but Mush himself had already guesstimated a 50% chance of failure, meaning insurance would have cost at least half as much as the satellite itself. And insurance can't cover the loss of all that researcher time, only the paychecks associated with it.
Besides which, there's not much demand for satellites on a long, poorly characterized orbit between Earth and Mars, not to mention that they'd have to survive a pass through the Van Allen radiation belts. And that trajectory was important because the test launch was also a technological demonstration: Falcon could already get to low orbit, SpaceX needed to demonstrate that Falcon Heavy was capable of more than that - surviving the radiation belts and delivering a substantial payload on a transit to Mars accomplished that.
And then there's the elephant in the room: the PR impact of those visuals. Musk is no Steve Jobs, but he does embrace the power of a media sensation. Musk's goal is for humanity to colonize Mars, and to do that he needs to re-inspire the public interest in space that faded after the Moon landings. SpaceX only exists because the Russians wouldn't sell him an old ICBM for his original plan to try to inspire that interest by launching a little greenhouse to Mars for those visuals. I have no doubt that Starman inspired a lot of kids (including many an adult's inner child) to embrace the romance of humanity spreading into space. And those childish dreams are a powerful force for motivating people to do the massive amount of hard work necessary before even a glimmer of that dream can become a reality.
Musk has also on several occasions expressed his belief in the importance of a large-scale optimistic vision for humanity, and I have to say that that's something that's been sorely lacking for a long time. Unless you've embraced denial, it's become pretty obvious that our century-long refusal to seriously confront global warming means that things on Earth are likely to get pretty grim over the course of the next century or ten, and that creates a serious risk of driving big-picture thinkers to depression and self-absorbtion. Some may find inspiration in the idea of spending their lifetime fighting the good fight against near-impossible odds, but dreams of a better future are a powerful thing, and right now on Earth all we can realistically work towards is damage control. In space though - there's wealth and power almost beyond imagining there for the taking. There's even the added benefit that both the spin-off technologies and the orbital construction capacity will be immensely useful for making life on an increasingly hostile Earth far more pleasant, and opening the door to taking control of climate change through direct control of the sunlight hitting Earth.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday October 10 2020, @03:06PM
...and also the potential negative PR impact of a hundred students sobbing when the scorched remains of their beloved project, that Mr Musk so kindly offered to put in space for free, washed up on a Florida beach. If Starman had bought the farm, Musk could and would have made it a big gung-ho joke and proudly added it to his existing portfolio of lithobraking and Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly videos. Any failure involving a real payload - even if the owners knew the risks and were getting a free/cheap ride - would have been a field day for our mawkish mass media.
Also, anybody who can watch an entire Falcon Heavy go up (of which maybe 20% will come back down in a usable form) and then worry about the waste of the mere few hundred kilos of steel represented by the already written-off Tesla has a seriously skewed sense of perspective.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2020, @04:09PM
on topic: very cool.
off topic "it's become pretty obvious that our century-long refusal to seriously confront global warming".
like always there's a reason for this. i too, thought everything is possible when young and "bought" into this ...
however i am a bit older now and did some of these 'em "suggested improvements" (plant tree, connect guerilla solar to grid, next car hybrid).
the problem is that we aren't on a "green field" planet.
everything has been "touched", measured, covered with laws and regulations and
the planet is mostly "brown field".
so in the case of "going green" we are confronted with a lot of convenience of plentiful one-way resources, financial mechanisms and "already built" infrastructure, libraries concerning these technologies and brainwashing institutions ...
it works, people profit and overall live a better life ... in the end if you're complaining you lost out on the regular bond payments and solid jobs and family and finance and education FOR this system etc.
what we are seeing is not just "carbon dioxide" generation but a thin layer of mushy beings on this planet, like mold on apple, converting successfully buried hydro carbons into carbon dioxide FOR THEIR BENEFIT ... there's a WHOLE complex mechanism at work: from generating more "mold", educating them, upkeep, financing and ofc ... networking (who do you know)?
point is, that you cannot teach a fish to walk on land.
cost, for them, is stored in a ledger on the same bookshelf as santa clauses book of bad and good children.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2020, @05:19PM
In case of a democrat win, Musk is going to have serious problems for countering the lockdown narrative in 2020. Hope his optimism is strong.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2020, @04:50AM
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 10 2020, @05:15AM
I mean, if he were alive to start with, he would be almost immortal. He's going to be up there for a long, long time, unless he drives into an asteroid or something.
On the other hand, the Space Marines may chase him down for failure to observe navigation laws yet to be written.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2020, @05:42AM
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