And the purpose of blasting a Roadster into Geosynchronous orbit is....

[Xenoilphobe]

i bet they set a new 0 to 60 record..

 

[stevezzzz]

i bet they set a new 0 to 60 record..

Actually, the real record would have been just before booster cutoff: for a given thrust, max acceleration occurs at the lightest vehicle weight. So from, say, 15,000 to 15,060 mph in under half a second.

 

[gavine]

More like Grimaldi from Heavy Metal.

A lot more. Wow. I never saw that before. Someone needs to Tweet that Elon.

 

[TEG]

That clip has been tweeted to him, and posted here many times.

 

[Mark Z]

Best advertisement possible. I thought the rocket would enclose the vehicle the entire time. To see Starman driving the Roadster in space is a thrill. Adds value to our touchscreen navigation Mars maps.

Be thankful Elon didn't send a Model 3 into space. The waiting reservation holders might not be pleased.

 

[ModelX]

I hope space X or Tesla starts selling these images! Starman and the roadster in space! Posters, prints, anything!

 

[TEG]

Be thankful Elon didn't send a Model 3 into space. The waiting reservation holders might not be pleased.

There are a lot of Roadster owners going "but hey - he sent those rare carbon fiber trim pieces off into space! "

 

[Evoforce]

And now we can say that red is the fastest colored car!

 

[ecarfan]

Not to mention how this has sparked the imagination of kids everywhere ... it's amazing.

Yes, I loved it! Watching the livestream, when the first image of the Roadster and Starman came up I laughed out loud even though I knew it was going to be shown. Actually seeing it out in space was hysterical. And brilliant. Fired up the imagination of adventurous souls around the world!

 

[RDoc]

Totally agree with other posters. IMHO this was a brilliant move that gives SpaceX a lot of goodwill and inspires a lot of young people to consider science and engineering careers. I suspect it worked out even better than Elon imagined.

One further comment: SpaceX needs goodwill because there are a lot of people in Congress and their lobbyists who don't like SpaceX at all. Nowhere near enough pork for them.

 

[Nevek]

Nowhere near enough pork for them.

Hard to make it out of the gravity well carrying all that pork. Should be an advantage for SpaceX.

 

[SpiceWare]

APOD for February 10th - Roadster, Starman, Planet Earth

APOD always puts a scaled down image on the page, in this instance 1067x600. If you click on the image you'll be taken to a larger version, which for Starman is 1920x1080. So always click an APOD image first before saving it.

If you like space related photos there's a Calendar link at the bottom of each page that lets you easily browse all the photos they've posted since they started back in 1995.

 

[RDoc]

Hard to make it out of the gravity well carrying all that pork. Should be an advantage for SpaceX.
View attachment 278926

Actually, the pork stays on the ground in the Congressional districts. For that matter, the SLS seems to be pretty much stuck to the ground as well generating more pork (don't go into makin' bacon).

 

[Chopr147]

I admit I thought it was a dumb gimmick by Elon who outsmarted himself into being the butt of jokes.
Of course i'm not a PR guy but who's being laughed at now?

 

[Tex EV]

Took my kids to their first planetarium show today. Guess what was on the pre-show reel? Starman in the Roadster superimposed against the usual star background, with "Life on Mars?" on loop. Mission accomplished, Elon.

 

[SpiceWare]

APOD for February 13th - Car Orbiting Earth.

Like before, click on the image first to get the larger one.

 

[dpeilow]

@SpiceWare do you have anything to do with SpaceWire?

 

[SpiceWare]

@SpiceWare do you have anything to do with SpaceWire?

While I do work in the space industry, I'm not involved with that. My last name is Spice and I've been writing software since being introduced to a Commodore PET in 1980, my freshman year in high school. More info in this and later replies in the topic Old farts reminiscing about computers.

I've been using SpiceWare since the 80s for software I've written. Alien Invaders was one of the few games written for 80 column mode of the 128. In spite of what this guy thinks, it's not a AAA release by some large company - it was just a simple experiment I wrote in my bedroom in my college days to get a better understanding of the video chip.

I released into the public domain and it was well received back in the day.

MusicTerm was for calling BBSes that ran my BBS software (64-Net or 128-Net, there was also VIC-Net but it predated MusicTerm). The BBS could send music in real time at 300 baud, let you play games with your joystick, and many other advanced features like sprite and character animation.

This is a current example from my latest Atari 2600 homebrew game, which was released in October at PRGE. It's a port of Bosconian, complete with speech which you can hear in this video.

 

[PRJIM]

 

[Graffi]

I have been curious about where Starman and Roadster were and ran across this site. It is now in my favorites so I can stay updated. Enjoy!

Where is Starman going to be in the future