What now for SpaceX's Mars-bound Telsa Roadster?

[Rhiannon12866]

If the SpaceX Falcon Heavy is the world's most powerful rocket, then the Tesla Roadster that it shot into interplanetary space holds the record for the fastest car in history. This cosmic convertible will orbit around the Sun once every 1.6 years, but how long will it continue to do so, and what will be its fate? Will it still look as pristine a billion years from now as it did in the videos beamed back to Earth? Probably not.

At the moment, there are five US spacecraft speeding out of our Solar System, never to return. Billions of years from now, when our Sun has turned into a red giant and engulfed the Earth in nuclear fire, the Pioneer, Voyager, and New Horizons probes will still be traveling through our galaxy like a quintet of robotic Odysseus's.

Even back in our system and revolving about our Earth are satellites that will still be around for many millions of years. For example, one Earth-orbiting satellite, LAGEOS-1, is a passive laser reflector satellite that will not only remain circling our planet for 8.4 million years, but will remain functional for most of that time.

With a track record like that, it looks as if the Tesla Roadster that rocketed into space on February 6, 2018 will be cruising happily among the stars as a permanent monument to the early days of commercial deep space travel. It's a nice thought that the Starman mannequin driver and his cherry red ride will still be around long after the pyramids have crumbled to sand.

Except that's not going to happen. In fact, the Starman and the Roadster are in for a very unpleasant time and may not be in very good shape after a few years. And their lifespan, while huge by human standards, may be rather limited.


More: https://newatlas.com/tesla-roadster-fate/53317/



Starman racing the Earth (Credit: SpaceX)

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

1. Well that settles it...

I think that I need to get a slightly more reliable car.

[NNadir]

2. There's something positively obscene about this expensive publicity stunt. n/t

[SCantiGOP]

3. Not if you look at the science behind it

This was not a publicity stunt, it was the test firing of a totally new rocket that may be used as a core of future space programs. Test firings of new rockets always carry a payload to simulate a satellite load. Often it is just a block of metal; the important thing is to have the weight. So the car served that purpose.

Why did profit-making companies pay $1/2 million for a 30 second commercial during the Super Bowl? They obviously felt the expense was worth the publicity. Musk received publicity for Space-X that he couldn't have purchased for a billion dollars. Since he was bearing the cost what is the problem?

As has been pointed out, Musk did not do this to make money; rather, he has made money so he could do this. Space exploration is his passion. I applaud him and celebrate his major technological feat that will benefit all of humanity.

[NNadir]

4. Musk is a highly subsidized billionaire who built a car for other...

...billionaires and for millionaires and for reasons that escape me, as a scientist, became some kind of hero on the left.

When I was a kid - a long time ago admittedly - one of the things that defined liberalism was less emphasis on wonderful billionaires and millionaires and more on the people who have, um, nothing.

Musk is not a scientist of merit.

He may hire scientists and engineers - albeit in a way that wastes their talents on trivialities - but he's nothing more than a self promoter.

One of the concerns that NASA - a public agency that actually does real science - has often expressed is the desire to not contaminate space, or planets like Mars, with unsterilized junk.

I have a hard time understanding the worship of this guy, who I consider an asshole, and I despise his environmentally useless car, and his expensive publicity stunts.

If the idiotic car had broken apart in orbit, it would have strewn even more space debris which has a very real risk of making space based technology and access to space for future generations either impossible or highly dangerous.

More than 500,000 pieces of debris, or “space junk,” are tracked as they orbit the Earth. They all travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft.

The rising population of space debris increases the potential danger to all space vehicles, but especially to the International Space Station, space shuttles and other spacecraft with humans aboard.

NASA takes the threat of collisions with space debris seriously and has a long-standing set of guidelines on how to deal with each potential collision threat. These guidelines, part of a larger body of decision-making aids known as flight rules, specify when the expected proximity of a piece of debris increases the probability of a collision enough that evasive action or other precautions to ensure the safety of the crew are needed.

At least we can say of the Super Bowl didn't send possibly contaminated crap into space, nor did it pose a risk to future legitimate space operations.

I can think of no more trivializing crap to do with science and engineering than to make orbital space a billboard for another useless and egotistical publicly subsidized billionaire.

Otherwise it was just great! I'll burn incense tonight in front a giant statue of Musk and send him all the money I spend on my kid's college to participate in Musk worship.

Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll remain convinced that the adulation and the Trumpian self-promotion of this publicly subsidized billionaire is, in fact, obscene.

You know that there are children in this country who go to school in buildings with leaky roofs, whose textbooks are 15 years old, dog eared and their bindings falling apart?

As a liberal who rejects the trajectory of Reaganism, I happen to think that there are many things that good government can do better than privatizing schemers who end up nonetheless on the public dole, as Musk is.

Space is one of those things. Education is another. Training scientists and engineers should be another.

Earth orbital space belongs to all of humanity, and like many other natural systems and resources, must be used wisely and with a modicum of attention to the needs of future generations. A promotional stunt trashing it is not a great achievement. It is, again, an obscenity that shits on these values.

[struggle4progress]

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