I thought the first SpaceX launches and recoveries were cool, finally bringing spacecraft technology into the fictional 1930’s. But since all they ever did with it was take NASA money to deliver pizza to the ISS, I lost interest quickly. Big Brother is more plugged into tech news than I am…
Elon Musk says SpaceX will try to launch his Tesla Roadster on new heavy-lift rocket
BB sent me the linkage, along with better commentary than I could have come up with…
At long last, it seems that the Falcon Nine Heavy might actually be only a few months away from its first launch attempt. (It’s been “next year” for how many years?) Unsurprisingly there are no customers who want to put an expensive scientific or commercial payload on such a risky flight, so the question of payload and destination has been open for some time now.
My prediction would have been a load of water ballast lofted around the moon and back, but now there is official word; If Elon Musk is to be believed (and occasionally he can) the payload will be his Tesla Roadster and the destination will be Mars orbit. I wonder if Elon will ever be reunited with his car?
If he’s to be believed – and I guess we can believe him on this point if no other – the answer is no. 😀
I guess once you’ve spent however much that thing cost to build, by comparison it doesn’t much matter what you use for ballast. It isn’t as though he’s selling so many he can’t afford to launch one into space.
Musk apparently has a rep for Trump-like Twitter trolling, and not everything he says turns out to be true. And since the original announcement there has been some question as to whether they were really planning to use a Tesla as ballast for the first demo flight. Seems it’s so, though.
I wonder what Jerry Pournelle would say…
Robert, if only you had asked three months ago, you might have gotten an answer.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure he would say something along the line of “Hey, a citizen should be able to blow their extra money any way they see fit”.