Some cool pics of the Falcon Heavy inside hanger.
What a beast!
Are they going to try & land all 3 of those rockets back on earth like they do for their normal launches?
I think the plan is to land the side boosters at the landing sites at Cape Canaveral, and the center booster on a barge.
Seriously how do you top this as a payload.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BdA94kVgQhU/
I love Elonâs explanation.
elonmuskA Red Car for the Red Planet
Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring.
Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel.
The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit.
What a ridiculous and imperious waste of resources. Such respect as i have for Musk has significantly diminished. What about microbial contamination? Does he need permission or to file plans for his orbital models? What a complete joke.
It pisses me right the fuck off.
What the what? This is awesome. Itâs only consuming the cost of a car vs a concrete weight, and itâs getting every dollar back of that difference in publicity.
I have no idea what you are talking in regards to contamination or permission though. Itâs just a test flight to nowhere.
Well, it would have been nice to offer the payload space to students, scientists, etc. Imagine how many cubesats that thing could launched.
I thought the roadster thing was written off as a joke, but apparently itâs back on?
Just imagine some aliens coming across that in orbit around the sun thousands of years after the earth has been reduced to a radioactive wastelandâŚ
Itâs not launching to low earth orbit or geostationary orbit. Itâs a test flight. They have it aimed out into nowhere because of the very real chance that something may go wrong. I donât think thereâs any use, however speculative, for the payload.
Microbial contamination. What the hell are you talking about? Did you miss the part about it being orbit around Mars not actually on the planet. Do these microbes have thrusters which allow them to get to a planet?
You donât put real experiments on maiden flights of new rockets, cause there is very high probability that experiments will be destroyed.
The point is that just because he intends for it to go into permanent orbit doesnât mean it will.
And somehow a car is more contaminated than some other dummy cargo of earth origin?
Explain to me to how this flight risk microbial contamination any more than any of the dozen of probes weâve sent to Mars?
Wow people need to get their panties unbunched. Itâs not actually going to Mars, itâs being sent on a orbit out to Mars distance.
Which is OK too. The other options all result in violent deconstructing at the atomic level.
Arenât they built in clean rooms?
What are you talking about?
Microbial contamination isnât a thing that matters unless you are trying to study microbes.