Elon Musk needs a new car

[robkelk]

His old car is now in space.

[Dartz]

Elon Musk is going full Hughs.

[robkelk]

Now you've got me imagining the Spruce Booster...

[Dartz]

Fenspace is that-away.

Just avoid the cloud of glowing death.

[hazard]

Well, that's a better result than 'scattered across Cape Canaveral.'

That launch went rather well, all things told.

[InsaneTD]

There's a camera mounted to the door so you can watch the dummy in a space suit sit in the car as it floats away.

[LynnInDenver]

There's a camera mounted to the door so you can watch the dummy in a space suit sit in the car as it floats away.

When I saw the screen shots of the live feed... it's a convertible...

...and I suddenly had the opening of Heavy Metal come into my head.

[Labster]

The central stage 1 was a loss, and it damaged the engines of the Of Course I Still Love You on reentry after a couple engines failed to ignite. But otherwise a great success.  Even if it's going do be eclipsed by the BFR in a few years, this really heralds a new era of spaceflight.

I was watching the launch live on an iPad in the nursing home where my grandmother is dying, laying there mostly unconscious.  I really don't know what I should have been feeling at the time -- still don't know honestly.  She's 101 years old and it's definitely her time; she can't even talk any more.  So it was like a weird mix of joy, sorrow, relief, wonder, and love.  She was the one who brought me into gaming with pinochle, and thus a large part of the reason I'm writing to you here today.

[InsaneTD]

There's a camera mounted to the door so you can watch the dummy in a space suit sit in the car as it floats away.

When I saw the screen shots of the live feed... it's a convertible...

...and I suddenly had the opening of Heavy Metal come into my head.

It's got "DON'T PANIC" on the dash.


@Labster: stuff like that is hard no matter how you frame it. Mourning is hard and different for everyone, do it your way and remember there are people there for you.

[robkelk]

Headline at The Register: MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS

[Bob Schroeck]

And some great photos and video in that -- including an embedded livestream from the car.

[Star Ranger4]

He missed his target though.  Granted, apparently based on past flights there was a 50/50 chance of loosing the payload, but part of the POINT of this whole exercise is to be able to lift loads out of the gravity well TO WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED.  Therefore missing your orbit, to me, makes all the rest pointless.

I am, however, somehow reminded of a certain XKCD 'What if' caption;

'What just happened?'
'Musk must have drug an update to the wrong folder!'

[Dartz]

Overambitious NASA mission fails.

So-called 'Renewable' rocket crash lands on test flight. Publicity Stunt payload misses intended orbit wildly. If the agency cannot succeed at a publicity launch, how can it succeed with actual operations.

... you just know that's how it'd be spun.

Going out to grab that car though - it might be worth the price of the rocket flight to bring it back.

Flotsam and Jetsam? Or Space Piracy?

[Labster]

I hadn't heard about the missed orbit thing, but this has some details:  https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/02/08/st...ew-mirror/

That's a little unfortunate, but not enough to consider the mission unsuccessful.  It's a test flight of a new rocket.  Not doing a RUD is already a victory.  It's not even that far off course.  Just think of it as if Lindbergh's flight to Paris ended up in the Azores.  That's close, right?

Yeah, people would be harder on the government, but after spending this much time and money on the boringly-named Space Launch System and the Constellation program, I think they deserve it.  The Space Shuttle too, which for all of its successes really held back the space program in the 1970s and 2000s.   Seriously, we've never landed on the moon my entire life.  Fail fast, iterate, and only after a few cycles put humans on the thing.

But if you just keep designing and never actually use the thing, what do you expect your public support to do?  I mean, yeah, I'm one of the people who helped write a Perl 6 compiler, a language that famously took 15 years to finally appear.  But we could use it for stuff by 2010.  The great cathedrals took decades to build, but chapels within were used for worship far before the things were actually finished.  I have family who works for ULA, but I'm still on SpaceX's side because they provide results while promoting the idea of space exploration to everyone.

[hazard]

The real issue with NASA is that they are subject to internal politics. This includes the ever critical matter of funding. Right now NASA can call upon something like 0.5% of the US federal budget, and at 3.9 trillion dollars that's about 20 billion dollars, accounting for the rounding error.

During the heydays of the Space Race NASA could call upon 2 to 4% of the US's federal budget, and at the time the USA's federal taxes were pretty high. I think it boiled down to something like 2 percent or more of the USA's GDP at its height. I mean, the current GDP of the USA is 18 trillion 624 billion dollar and change (calculated for 2016 according to tradingeconomics.com), which would mean that if NASA could call upon the same resources now as it could then it'd have a budget of 372 billion dollars and change.

I mean, think for a moment; NASA has in comparison to when it was actually doing the whole sending people to the Moon thing an 18 times smaller budget than then. And that's the conservative estimate not accounting for shifts in the economy. And it has a lot of resources tied down in maintaining what it already has.

[Star Ranger4]

Correction, Dart. SpaceX only leases space from Kennedy, NASA has little direct control over operations except in issues of overall range and facility safety.

Its also the Orion spacecraft, not Constellation.

How do I know all these things, you wonder? Well, for one, Maternal Parental Unit works quality assurance in the industry, and I was just out at KSC a couple of weeks ago (the day of the test fire for the Falcon Heavy, to be exact)

I'd been contemplating kind of doing a trip report kind of thing, but wasn't sure if there was interest? (yes, it would include photos)

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh my yes indeed there is interest, from the board owner at least. <grin>

[robkelk]

Interest +1!

[Labster]

pics or it didn't happen

[nocarename]

Definite interest here!

[Dartz]

The big difference between SpaceX and NASA is both in the size of the organisation - NASA does far more than build rockets, and in the vertical integration SpaceX has.

The rocket, the payload, the guidance and the engines are all built under the one roof.

A lot of NASA's equipment comes from sub-contractors, and sub-sub-contractors, and sub-sub contractors. To a design spec by NASA. The Saturn V, IIRC, was running on Rocketdyne engines, had stages built by Boeing, Douglas, North American and Grumman, with IBM computers. All of these have to be coordinated in some way so their equipment- made in different parts of a big country by different companies with different internal standards, all had to somehow fit together and work first time since every rocket NASA builds is effectively a prototype. At each step along the way, the sub-contractor takes their own bite to make their own profit, so costs are always going to be higher.

That, and the political tendency to go Ramses on previous administration's programs.

[hazard]

I think payloads are generally handled by the organisation buying lift capacity, but otherwise SpaceX does have a considerable efficiency advantage just because they can do most of the work on the rocket themselves.