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Falcon Heavy to Launch Next Month, Musk Says He's Sending His Roadster to Mars
- Thread starter anticitizen13.7
- Start date
I would prefer it if Elon had picked a pointless gas guzzling SUV like the Merc G65 and sent it on a one way collision course with the sun.
He should launch a hydrogen car up there, given that their proponents love to constantly tell us that the fuel is the most common element in the universe.
And me, in a tweet to Elon several months ago suggesting that SpaceX use a pre-production Model 3 vehicle as a dummy payload.There have been a few people who tossed this idea around previously (cough.... me
@HankLloydRight Elon didn’t just decide a few days ago to throw his Roadster on top of the FH for fun. This would have to have been planned many months ago, because the payload bay attachments would have to be custom made to hold the car. So Elon’s recent tweets were not some spur-of-the-moment late night ramblings. His back-and-forth with The Verge is likely explained by his awareness that his announcement the day before was so unusual that many people were not taking him literally so he decided to have some fun for a few hours before again stating as clearly as he could that yes, a Roadster was going to Mars, in the spirit of the giant wheel of cheese (labeled “Top Secret”) that was inside the first Dragon capsule to go to orbit in 2010 (see Space company's secret cargo a 'cheesy' joke - CNN.com ).
Here is a photo of the fourth Inmarsat 5 ready to be encapsulated in a Falcon 9 fairing. Think about what would have to be done to mount a Roadster inside there. You don’t decide to do that with a Roadster a few weeks before the launch date. It has to be planned long in advance.
I’m now patiently waiting for someone to Photoshop that image and add a Roadster in place of the commsat.
I fully expect SpaceX to release a photo before the launch date of the Roadster mounted inside the fairing to prove they are doing it.
I fully expect SpaceX to release a photo before the launch date of the Roadster mounted inside the fairing to prove they are doing it.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
I’m now patiently waiting for someone to Photoshop that image and add a Roadster in place of the commsat.
I fully expect SpaceX to release a photo before the launch date of the Roadster mounted inside the fairing to prove they are doing it.
Nah, I'm waiting for the real-time video of the fairing ejection.
That will be awesome! And I bet SpaceX will show it, as they have for other missions recently. With the appropriate soundtrack on the livestream, of course.
e-FTW
New electron smell
That man right there has done just as much (if not more, since you know, he went to space and told us all about it) to make space interesting and exciting.
Chris Hadfield's Twitter and YouTube feed while he was up there took over the Internets. He renewed my interest in space, and made me a SpaceX superfan.
Easy enough. Earth's orbit averages pretty close to 150Gm (gigameters). Mars is a bit more elliptical orbit, but call it 225Gm on average. Circumference of an ellipse is (r1+r2) where r1 and r2 are the semi-major and semi-minor axes. Hmmm... not as easy as I thought... don't know the semi-minor... research...
OK. Thanks to this website. First eccentricity, which is the ratio of the displacement of the focus from the center of the ellipse, over the semi-major axis. The focus (one of them anyway) is the sun, 150Gm from the perihelion (Earth's orbit). The center is halfway between Earth's and Mars' orbits; 187.5Gm. So e=37.5/187.5 = 0.2 (convenient, that, a consequence of Mars' orbit being pretty close to 1.5 times Earth's). The semi-minor axis is b=sqrt((1-e^2)a^2) (sorry no formatting). b=183.71Gm. So the circumference of the elliptical orbit is 1.166Tm (terameters), or 724.5 million miles. Roughly.
What fun!
I'd call Sheldon, but he seems to be helping Amy create some glow-in-the-night fish. Maybe if we look into some of his junior high school class journals we can get the answer.
Agreed. Hadfield was singing under adverse conditions. Let’s stick with the original by Bowie.
I’d call that “deep space” alright.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Yes, I agree with you. This was definitely planned. Though, I am sure that mounting a roadster would not be nearly as complex. It needs to be secure and weight balanced. The satellite, OTOH, is a delicate and complex instrument worth millions (not to put down the value of a Roadster), that has to function precisely upon deployment.Elon didn’t just decide a few days ago to throw his Roadster on top of the FH for fun. This would have to have been planned many months ago, because the payload bay attachments would have to be custom made to hold the car. So Elon’s recent tweets were not some spur-of-the-moment
Here is a photo of the fourth Inmarsat 5 ready to be encapsulated in a Falcon 9 fairing. Think about what would have to be done to mount a Roadster inside there. You don’t decide to do that with a Roadster a few weeks before the launch date. It has to be planned long in advance.
I'm not so sure. The quick switch from a Mars orbit to a solar one suggests someone just did some back of the envelope math.
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