Elon Musk Flaunts Pics of Mars-Bound Tesla Roadster aboard Falcon Heavy Rocket

Elon Musk has updated his Instagram with new photos that suggest he wasn’t joking when he announced plans to launch a Tesla Roadster into space on the maiden flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. "The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit."

The images show the red convertible atop a payload adapter, positioned between the two towering halves of the fairing that will be mounted atop the Falcon Heavy rocket, shielding the Roadster during its ascent into Earth orbit. If successful, the launch will put the car on a path to intercept the orbit of Mars.

More space junk.

Useless shit is useless.

But think of the range that car will get on a single charge!

If this means what I think it means, how is this different from any other kind of pollution?

Launching cars into orbit for no other reason than one can?

the_servicer said:

If this means what I think it means, how is this different from any other kind of pollution?

Launching cars into orbit for no other reason than one can?

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It's a maiden flight, which is always indicative of being a full test launch, with a payload selected to be a Tesla Roadster. They could have selected anything for that payload: rocks, fidget spinners, cow shit, surplus Itaniums...

Explained in the Link.... I like it!

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.

He's going to launch it on a billion year epileptic orbit? Our sun orbits our galaxy in 200 million years.

It's a joke.he is not launching a car into orbit.

Jtal said:

He's going to launch it on a billion year epileptic orbit? Our sun orbits our galaxy in 200 million years.

It's a joke.he is not launching a car into orbit.

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LINK

He is launching the car into MARS orbit. It is estimated to be a stable orbit for a billion years, not one orbit of Mars every billion years...

Edit for orbit info:

"No, it's not going to Mars. It's going near Mars," Plait wrote, specifically in what's called a Hohmann transfer orbit: an elliptical path that goes out to the orbit of Mars and back to Earth orbit on a near-endless loop (hence the "billion years or so" detail from Musk).

Oh yeah, no way this will end up in a movie...... They aren't making a Martian 2 are they? Will the batteries burn like they do here on earth or will they just smolder and smoke?

Movie takes place 1000 years from now. And these group of kids are going to get the car from orbit.

Musk should just send it out into deep space so that the Transformers can find the car.

I would have loved if this thing was sent to the surface. First person to mars gets a roadster.

even without gasoline, there is still oil and other fluids in the car that will eventually leak into the nearly pristine martian surface - how insanely stupid is this marketing stunt?

for once I actually hope that particular rocket blows up on the launching pad (as long as no-one is hurt)

vibe said:

even without gasoline, there is still oil and other fluids in the car that will eventually leak into the nearly pristine martian surface - how insanely stupid is this marketing stunt?

for once I actually hope that particular rocket blows up on the launching pad (as long as no-one is hurt)

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It is a barren rock that is ours to do what we want to with.

Smashing Young Man said:

It is a barren rock that is ours to do what we want to with.

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Exactly. What precisely do you think we are going to do if/when we begin trying to establish a colony there? Live nekkid among the pristine environment? Ultimately It's gong to take hundreds of tons of equipment from planet earth to even try to exist there in the short term. And "oil and fluids" aren't any more or less evil than plastic, steel, aluminum, mercury, arsenic, lead or any one of hundreds of chemicals we have already put on the surface of Mars. What do you think is inside all those computer electronics and sensors? Unicorns and rainbows?

The larger long term biological ramifications will be the bacteria we bring to the planet with humans. It'll all be over in a blink. Not that we havn't already done that with the rovers, no matter how careful we tried to be. The human waste and excrement isn't going to sent back into orbit either. Earthly bacteria will be all over the the place within moments of humans touching down.

Of course, the environment is so insanely hostile none of it may matter anyway. We act like we can tame Mars somehow but the technology to terraform or live in self sustaining cities in a hostile environment is still massively fanciful science fiction. We've never even created an undersea city where aid and supply is only a mile away, or an orbital colony, or a lunar colony let alone on another planet where it takes months to send anything there and nothing can ever come back.

We aren't going to crack this nut until we have actual space ships that can go back and forth at will. Like the early ships that colonized America from Europe. Those voyages were dangerous and many ships were lost, but the ships could travel in both directions not just one.

And honestly, Mars is a lot more barren and uninteresting than NASA makes it out to be. If you could go, you'd want come home rather quickly once the novelty wore off.

Would the settlers who came to America have been willing to stay if the entire continent looked like the Sahara desert? And that's not even in the same ballpark as how hostile Mars is.

vibe said:

even without gasoline, there is still oil and other fluids in the car that will eventually leak into the nearly pristine martian surface - how insanely stupid is this marketing stunt?

for once I actually hope that particular rocket blows up on the launching pad (as long as no-one is hurt)

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It will not be landing on Mars, just orbiting somewhat near it. No need to worry.

Tesla will hold the title of the "fastest production vehicle not under its own power."

vibe said:

even without gasoline, there is still oil and other fluids in the car that will eventually leak into the nearly pristine martian surface - how insanely stupid is this marketing stunt?

for once I actually hope that particular rocket blows up on the launching pad (as long as no-one is hurt)

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I wonder if the rocket scientist at SpaceX know that there may be some "leaking fluids" in their test payload. Naa, probably not, they all seem like a dumb collection of people.

Its also not going to Mars.

hexamon said:

It will not be landing on Mars, just orbiting somewhat near it. No need to worry.

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It actually wont be anywhere even close to Mars, or anything else for that matter(purposely). Its going in orbit around the sun, and its orbit path will sometimes go as far as Mars obit.

Brilliant entrepreneur. Internal combustion won't work on Mars. So, he builds an electric car. Next, he builds a rocket to send it to Mars. Everyone on Mars (or, at least, everyone who is cool on Mars) will be driving Teslas. Sure, they'll all be loss-leaders. Where will he make his money? Shipping up the new batteries. Yeah, consumables, baby. That's where the money is...

c3k said:

Brilliant entrepreneur. Internal combustion won't work on Mars. So, he builds an electric car. Next, he builds a rocket to send it to Mars. Everyone on Mars (or, at least, everyone who is cool on Mars) will be driving Teslas. Sure, they'll all be loss-leaders. Where will he make his money? Shipping up the new batteries. Yeah, consumables, baby. That's where the money is...

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Except no production car is going to work on Mars. The freezing temperatures is going to make any Tesla useless. -80 to -100F temps at night, at the equator. Even worse as you get closer to the poles.

Also internal combustion engines will work on Mars. Obviously, not the ones we currently use in our cars now. Not without carrying it's own oxygen supply. There is oxygen on Mars, just an extremely smaller amount. So it should be possible to build an internal combustion engine to work on Mars, albiet, at a much lower power level due to the lower oxygen level. Although, not sure if it'd be enough power to move a large vehicle.