Musk send Red Roadster into space on a Falcon Heavy Rocket

All AOK.

What a great accomplishment!

I bet he grew up on Heinlein, Asimov, & Clark...

John ;-#)#

It was an impressive achievement for a first launch to go so well.

You have to admire his vision to get the thing off the ground. (and return the 3 boosters safely to Earth again)

Still not as powerful as the mighty Saturn V but it is by far the most powerful launch vehicle available today by some margin.

Lets hope it works as well with a commercial satellite payload.

Long way to go to reclaim a free used car.

Remarked to a coworker today that it may be a good opportunity for PR stunt ~20 years hence. You know, when the asteroid mining companies begin roaming the solar system, and one gets to say: "Well Ol' Musky, we know this used to be yours, but it seems to have been abandoned, and hey, finders keepers..."

Too bad it'll be a chunk of white (sun-bleached) or yellow (tholin-caked) junk by then.

Tim

Den tirsdag den 6. februar 2018 kl. 21.58.10 UTC+1 skrev amdx:

lift-off:

Who are those hysterical riffraff in the background? And who really gives a f*ck about this useless waste of effort destroying the ozone layer?

Come on Bloggsie, get with the program!

where's the green orb?

Cheers

Well, 2 of the 3 boosters made it, the center core didn't.

Also, the achieved orbit is way different from what was predicted in the press material. Apparently they decided to let the 2nd stage burn all the left-over fuel and it was a lot more than calculated.

I'm not so sure if that is a good thing to do. Customers want their payloads in a carefully pre-calculated orbit, and just shooting them as high as you can is not what they like. When you want to test the launch vehicle, why not test it with a realistic target (to get an exactly predicted speed) instead of just shooting it into the asteroid belt when you previously predicted it to go to Mars?

Also, the whole "we used a Tesla as a mass simulator" thing is just a PR stunt. The mass in orbit is claimed to be 16,800kg. The Tesla is "modified", apparently it does not have its batteries installed. (the runtime of the camera and transmitter to send life pictures was claimed to be 12 hours, which suggests it is not running from a 75kWh battery or somesuch). So it likely is only the chassis and body, and has a mass of maybe 5% of the total payload mass. I would not describe that as "use it as a mass simulator", it is more like decoration.

Of course all together it is still a great achievement. Only after successfull qualification launches one always wishes that something more useful would have been launched instead...

The simultaneous booster landing is too cool!

Don't Panic

George H.

I'm not really impressed, Boston has been putting thousands of real people parked in convertibles into space for decades!

It's more than a feeling.

different view of the landing,

What I want to see is the third booster scattering itself all over the seascape and drone ship. Should be epic.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

zoom, zoom, zoom.

RL