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SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to asteroid belt

181 points by alex_young 9y ago

alex_young 9y ago
Maybe asteroid mining is the real economic objective for the Falcon Heavy?
- HorizonXP 9y ago
  Maybe. Asteroid mining would be tremendously profitable, but not without a huge initial capital investment, the likes of which humanity has likely never seen (not hyperbole). But like the age old adage, you get rich by selling the pick axes, not by mining for gold. Elon probably figures that launches are where the money is, not the actual mining itself.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Earth does not really have a shortage of most things, so I don't think there is much use for Asteroid mining in the next 10,000 years unless people are also moving into space. EX: Just the worlds oceans has 5 lb of gold per person on the planet. It's far more abundant on land, but we really don't have a lot of need for gold.
    - WD-42 9y ago
      "just the world's oceans"? I think you understate just how vast the oceans are. That's some seriously diluted gold.
      - jws 9y ago
        Each person’s 5kg of gold also comes with a bonus of about 1/6 of a cubic kilometer of seawater. Hopefully yours is near a beach so you don’t have to haul it too far.
      - pwinnski 9y ago
        I suspect the comparison was against asteroid mining. The oceans are vast and difficult, but less vast and less difficult than space.
      - Retric 9y ago
        My point is the earth is huge. 260 billion cubic miles worth of asteroids without going into space. Sure we are currently limited to a tiny fraction of that but start processing magma directly is an option.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      But we do have a need for rare earth metals. Not as much as we thought we did in 2011, but it would still be a fantastic boon to manufacturing. It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.
      - alex_young 9y ago
        Say you also own an electric car company...
      - Retric 9y ago
        rare earth metals are not nearly as rare as you might think. The problem is they don't concentrate that much in any one area not that they can't be extracted for most places. So, we could extract them at 100x the current rate for the next 1,000 years and recycle them forever.
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      I'd rather gather them from the asteroid belt if possible so we could stop/limit the terrible effects of mining on the environment on earth. Also if we can setup manufacturing and fuel creation in space it would let us build larger and go farther because we wouldn't have to lift the pieces up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. At the very least we could build the bodies of spacecraft and fuel them in space and just lift harder to build stuff like electronics from Earth.
      - Retric 9y ago
        As long as we are just sending satellites up into LEO that takes far less energy than you might think. Flying around the world or getting to space are not that far apart. SpaceX for example is only worth ~20 billion because there is simply less demand for rockets and they cost less than many assume. Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home. PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.
        rtkwe 9y ago
        Even short of full colonization sourcing materials from space will allow much larger structures and shapes that would be difficult. Ultimately right now we're severely limited by the fairings, inflatables like Bigelow Aerospace solves some of that but ultimately there still limits to the volumes. I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.
        Retric 9y ago
        But what's the point of having large structures in space without people? We can already get big stuff into space aka building sized, so you're taking about mega structures which seem rather pointless right now.
    - jdavis703 9y ago
      If everyone consumed like an American we’d need something like 4x Earths. There are not enough resources on this planet unless westerners start scaling back their consumption and members of developing societies scale their ambitions down to match the new, lower consumption models of the West.
      - jotm 9y ago
        There's enough resources (especially since they don't just disappear and can be recovered by recycling), afaik, except for food - that's what we're consuming too fast to replenish.
      - Asdfbla 9y ago
        Then making that consumption sustainable and reducing waste would be a far better investment than pipe dreams of asteroid mining. Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Where do you see the profit? I would think precious metals get a lot less precious if they start falling out of the sky and I am pretty skeptical about other Earthside uses being profitable at all. People that go try to live in space are going to have a hard time of it so I wouldn't expect profit from supplying space industry either (the longer missions cosmonauts and astronauts have completed have had grave physical consequences, we aren't adapted to low g environments).
    - encrystation 9y ago
      There's probably lots of neat uses for gold at the moment that aren't financially viable due to the cost of the raw material.
      - mmjaa 9y ago
        Not to mention that the idea of things just falling out of the sky when we need them sounds great to me. Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        It's less fun when you realize that being able to drop any meaningful amount of material from space is equivalent to having a weapon of mass destruction. (This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
        Neutrion 9y ago
        Also the disruption brought by let huge objects falling through the sky will be devastating to atomsphere.
        mmjaa 9y ago
  - legitster 9y ago
    Except it's hard to argue that Elon Musk does anything for profit. Both Tesla and SpaceX are examples of businesses set up to disrupt an industry and worry about money later.
    - njarboe 9y ago
      I agree that he does not see the value of using money as a scoring system for his success, but making a profit, I am sure he is very interested in that. Profitable ventures are how he had the $100 million to create SpaceX. Profits of venture after venture until he acquired enough capital to actually start and fund a new aerospace company and be the largest investor in Tesla.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    There is no profit to be had right now in mining stuff in space and sending it down to Earth. There is however plenty of profits to be made in space, when we'll have a full space economy. Asteroid mining is an important part of both the future economy and of the current process of bootstrapping that economy. The idea is to use material mined in space, combined with manufacturing and processing in space, to create products and resources to be used in space, for space operations. Ultimately some of that may return to Earth, but the main goal is to avoid spending money on lifting things from Earth.
    - pythonaut_16 9y ago
      Low gravity (e.g. the moon) and zero gravity environments could have manufacturing advantages that are used to create projects that are shipped to earth.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        In the longer term, yes; right now, nothing game-changing on the horizon. The best example would be the work of Made In Space[0]. They've started manufacturing optical fiber on the ISS, where they can reach much greater medium purity than what one can do on Earth. It can, in principle, make fiber optics installations cheaper (less need for repeaters along the way), but the savings are entirely eaten by launch costs (and lack of economies of scale). The primary output of asteroid mining and space manufacturing will naturally be utilized in space, because we need to bootstrap a pretty large and self-sustaining economy to be able to profitably ship useful quantities of useful stuff downwell. -- [0] - http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/ http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/
      - le-mark 9y ago
        Low or zero gravity can also be a hindrance; how do you mine an asteroid if every wack of the pickaxe also propels you away from said asteroid? Clearly asteroids won't be mined with pickaxes, this is an illustration that gravity is in fact critical for all known terrestrial manufacturing processes! When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important. Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.
- hprotagonist 9y ago
  How else are we going to get that chunk of iron bolted onto Izzy before the moon detonates? ;-) Then we can make Jeff Bezos go get us a comet...
  - bhhaskin 9y ago
    That didn't end well for pretty much everyone involved.
    - hprotagonist 9y ago
      It took me until the end of part II to understand the book title. Then i think i actually cursed out loud.
      - jf 9y ago
        (In case anybody is wondering, these comments are referring to the excellent book "Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson)
        carapace 9y ago
        (Oh man, I think it was a stinker. I'm a big Stephenson fan and I was really disappointed. Just one point: It was so freighted with exposition and so thin on dialog and character development, "show, don't tell" was out the window.)
        hprotagonist 9y ago
        i liked the first 2/3 in an analytical hard sci-fi kind of way. The last third had some interesting world-building, but was less my speed.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  If you mean the Belt, then not really. The current iterator of asteroid mining will focus on near-Earth asteroids primarily, as they're close - exactly what you need for testing and for building a cislunar economy.
zaroth 9y ago
Not sure if overshot is the right word, I read the final burn was programmed to just empty the tanks, and they would get however far they could.
- craig1f 9y ago
  This is true. The engines overperformed and they're going a lot further than they meant to. This is better than anticipated news. It's only bad if you're REALLY focused on the Tesla "going to Mars", which it was never really going to do, because it would need to slow down once it got to Mars to stay in orbit around it. What we've done is prove capability. Getting to Mars is 100% possible, and we've also proven fault tolerance ... that is, we have enough fuel to spare that we can make correction-burns if necessary during the trip to Mars.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I wonder if the right transfer orbit, combined with a gravity assist, could put something into Mars orbit without further thrust. Really itching to install some Kerbal Space Program mods and try to figure it out...
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I was thinking of right transfer orbit combined with exactly right aerobraking, though I'm not sure if Mars has a dense enough atmosphere even if you were aiming for a flyby 1 millimeter above the surface (and that's assuming an indestructible Roadster)...
      - scrumbledober 9y ago
        From Musk's talk on the BFR he says the atmosphere of mars will be sufficient to remove 99% of the ship's momentum before the rockets kick in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQ0jBKH36Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQ0jBKH36Y
      - stcredzero 9y ago
manaskarekar 9y ago
Is there any simulation for projecting the path of the Roadster over its life? Kerbal Space Program? Is it going to orbit the Sun? I'm curious to know what happens on its orbit over time. Could it collide somewhere down the line? Perhaps SpaceX just launched the first man made Planet? EDIT: Would love to hear the downvoter's reasons.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Is there any simulation for projecting the path of the Roadster over its life? Not public, no. > Is it going to orbit the Sun? Yes. > Could it collide somewhere down the line? Yes, but unlikely in the next couple million years. > Perhaps SpaceX just launched the first man made Planet? A planet has a definition involving size and shape, which the Roadster does not fit.
  - manaskarekar 9y ago
    > Yes, but unlikely in the next couple million years. So, the reason I asked was because of not having a source. Did this come from SpaceX or someone authoritative who has done the math? > A planet has a definition involving size and shape, which the Roadster does not fit. That was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I know, correctness > humor.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > So, the reason I asked was because of not having a source. Did this come from SpaceX or someone authoritative who has done the math? SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0.
      - manaskarekar 9y ago
        > SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0. But one of the reasons I asked was not because I was worried about whether it would hit something on a short timescale (even though there is a non-zero chance it could happen). I'm aware of the vastness of space. I was curious about what happens over 10, 10^3, 10^9, 10^12, 10^100 orbits later.
lukateake 9y ago
It's set off a catastrophic chain-reaction of collisions in the asteroid belt. You've killed us all, Elon! /sarcasm
NathanKP 9y ago
One question I had about the Tesla launch that wasn't clear is whether the car was thoroughly sanitized prior to sending it up. My understanding is that any object that has the potential to reach another planet has to be thoroughly sterilized to avoid inadvertently introducing Earth organisms to another planet. The chances are technically low but it is theoretically possible and its why NASA has a dedicated page on "planetary protection": https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/technology/insituexploration/planetaryprotection/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/technology/insituexplorati... My hope is that the SpaceX people did the same for this Tesla. Otherwise it would be rather reckless especially since now it is clear there wasn't a specific controlled orbit path, just a burn to launch it as far as possible, and now its possible it could end up impacting something and potentially contaminating it with Earth organisms.
- Eire_Banshee 9y ago
  This isnt a real concern... right? Like... of all of the things to worry about in a rocket launch.
  - bicubic 9y ago
    Very real concern. A lot of effort goes into sterilising craft intended to land on or impact other planets. If we fail to do so, we run a real risk of seeding earth life on those planets and forever ruining our chances to test them for the existence of life prior to contamination.
    - garmaine 9y ago
      Not everyone sees that as a problem.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        While not everyone likely sees seeding Earth life on another planet as a problem, I think most would want to know if life existed there prior to that, since it helps us answer quite a few fundamental problems.
SirLJ 9y ago
Steve Wozniak: ‘I don’t believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says’ Also where exactly this thing is going, do they even know? Just watch knocking few asteroids out of orbit and destroying Earth...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  That comment was really aimed at Tesla, not SpaceX.
  - SirLJ 9y ago
    And at Elon in general...
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Well, if today you don't believe what Elon says wrt. space then you have to be completely out of touch with reality. I would be surprised of Woźniak dismissed SpaceX.
      - SirLJ 9y ago
        How many times Musk says something and doesn't deliver? Missing Mars and not knowing what are you doing is just the latest example... Musk is where hype goes to die...
        adventured 9y ago
        Well let's see. He delivered the Roadster. He delivered one of the highest rated, safest, highest performance cars in history with the S. He's delivering the 3. He's very clearly going to deliver on the semi-truck and the new Roadster. He delivered on dramatic battery distance capability for the S and 3, proving a lot of skeptics wrong. There was near universal skepticism that an electric car could do what the S proved it could in terms of distance, until Musk & Co. delivered on that. From early on, few thought Tesla as a business would make it this far. Survival was unexpected, much less thriving. Instead, they're chasing down $15 to $18 billion in sales for fiscal 2018. Up from $3 billion in 2014. And they've completely altered the entire multi-trillion dollar automobile industry, refocusing it nearly entirely on an all-electric future for every automaker. He delivered on the Australian power arrangement. In fact, it has worked so well, Australia is interested in more and bigger arrangements. He delivered on Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and reusable rockets. All of which proved a lot of skeptics wrong. Almost nobody thought SpaceX would pull off reusable rockets in the beginning. All in all, extraordinarily embarrassing for the people that have repeatedly doubted Musk. His batting average is tremendous when it comes to actually delivering, this is especially true given the nature of the things in question.
JustAnotherPat 9y ago
one of the twitter astronomers says this orbit might be unstable because of jupiter: https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/961085386650017798 https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/961085386650017798 Does that mean it will inevitably be pulled into a high gravity object and crash? Or does that mean it will just travel wildly through space?
- gbrown 9y ago
  Hopefully it gets grabbed by Jupiter and ejected from the solar system. That would be awesome.
  - dpkonofa 9y ago
    More than likely it's going to get ejected within the sun's gravity well and will slowly get pulled into the sun where it will cease to exist.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    Can you imagine an alien species finding that car, it would be hilarious. Then they find us and bring us free Dont panic T-shirts.
bmcusick 9y ago
Uber, but for Ceres
odammit 9y ago
I wonder what the chances are of it bumping off something and eventually crashing back into earth in a few hundred/thousand years.
- DroidX86 9y ago
  Astronomically low
- odammit 9y ago
  How dare I wonder.
banderman 9y ago
What are the odds of this being intentional? They had what, 140k pounds of potential payload? And all they sent up was a car?
- jmhobbs 9y ago
  Wikipedia says 140k to LEO, 37k to Mars and 7k to Pluto. Still, there's excess capacity there if a roadster is about 3k. Does seem like they sent it as far out as they could with that payload.
  - Flammy 9y ago
    Note: those are in pounds too, like OPs comment. These numbers are on SpaceX's website.
  - astrocat 9y ago
    the other thing is you're looking at max distance with full recovery of all cores (despite the failure to recover the middle core). If you went fully expendable on all cores you'd get a LOT more payload a LOT further.
MechEStudent 9y ago
The goal is to open the inner solar system for human habitation and resourcing. I'm betting there is a robot on the craft, and its aiming for Ceres. Lets see if the mounting pedestal comes back with enough Iridium to pay for the development and launch of the FH.
hrasyid 9y ago
So fast? Noob question, is the Mars orbit actually that close? How fast is the car moving?
- danaliv 9y ago
  No, this is a projection. It takes months to get to Mars with rocket technology.
  - hrasyid 9y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. Not sure if I misunderstood because I'm a lousy reader, or because the headlines are intentionally misleading.
    - danaliv 9y ago
      It's just rocket science. ;)
alistproducer2 9y ago
Am I wrong in thinking that this is the first time we have seen hi-def video of the earth from this distance?
matte_black 9y ago
How long is the video feed of the Tesla Roadster supposed to last? It'd be cool to see how a car looks like after several years of drifting around in space.
- umeshunni 9y ago
  In the news conference they said the battery was expected to last only 12 hours
  - matte_black 9y ago
    Aw crap, they couldn’t have put a low power time lapse camera at least? Maybe even solar charging. Whatever, they’ll be other launches I suppose.
woodandsteel 9y ago
A friend of mine who works at Tesla says the reason they put the roadster on top of the Falcon Heavy is they wanted to test how well the self-driving system works in outer space. It looks like it still needs some tweaks.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing the crash test results when it slaps into the side of an asteroid at 13,600 m/s Hopefully the dummy has a few G sensors on board...
matte_black 9y ago
When does SpaceX plan to put something down on Mars now, seeing as how they have proven they could reach Mars?
nodesocket 9y ago
Question I've been wondering about for the giant Tesla advertisement is if they had to make any modifications to the roadster to support being in space? The background space temperature is -455 F and obviously also zero gravity.
- mlevental 9y ago
  in the post launch presser musk says no changes were made
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    At -455 F, wouldn't the glass windshield crack? Metal body suffer from freezing? What am I missing?

181 points by alex_young 9y ago

alex_young 9y ago

Maybe asteroid mining is the real economic objective for the Falcon Heavy?

HorizonXP 9y ago
Maybe. Asteroid mining would be tremendously profitable, but not without a huge initial capital investment, the likes of which humanity has likely never seen (not hyperbole). But like the age old adage, you get rich by selling the pick axes, not by mining for gold. Elon probably figures that launches are where the money is, not the actual mining itself.
- Retric 9y ago
  Earth does not really have a shortage of most things, so I don't think there is much use for Asteroid mining in the next 10,000 years unless people are also moving into space. EX: Just the worlds oceans has 5 lb of gold per person on the planet. It's far more abundant on land, but we really don't have a lot of need for gold.
  - WD-42 9y ago
    "just the world's oceans"? I think you understate just how vast the oceans are. That's some seriously diluted gold.
    - jws 9y ago
      Each person’s 5kg of gold also comes with a bonus of about 1/6 of a cubic kilometer of seawater. Hopefully yours is near a beach so you don’t have to haul it too far.
    - pwinnski 9y ago
      I suspect the comparison was against asteroid mining. The oceans are vast and difficult, but less vast and less difficult than space.
    - Retric 9y ago
      My point is the earth is huge. 260 billion cubic miles worth of asteroids without going into space. Sure we are currently limited to a tiny fraction of that but start processing magma directly is an option.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    But we do have a need for rare earth metals. Not as much as we thought we did in 2011, but it would still be a fantastic boon to manufacturing. It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.
    - alex_young 9y ago
      Say you also own an electric car company...
    - Retric 9y ago
      rare earth metals are not nearly as rare as you might think. The problem is they don't concentrate that much in any one area not that they can't be extracted for most places. So, we could extract them at 100x the current rate for the next 1,000 years and recycle them forever.
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    I'd rather gather them from the asteroid belt if possible so we could stop/limit the terrible effects of mining on the environment on earth. Also if we can setup manufacturing and fuel creation in space it would let us build larger and go farther because we wouldn't have to lift the pieces up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. At the very least we could build the bodies of spacecraft and fuel them in space and just lift harder to build stuff like electronics from Earth.
    - Retric 9y ago
      As long as we are just sending satellites up into LEO that takes far less energy than you might think. Flying around the world or getting to space are not that far apart. SpaceX for example is only worth ~20 billion because there is simply less demand for rockets and they cost less than many assume. Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home. PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.
      - rtkwe 9y ago
        Even short of full colonization sourcing materials from space will allow much larger structures and shapes that would be difficult. Ultimately right now we're severely limited by the fairings, inflatables like Bigelow Aerospace solves some of that but ultimately there still limits to the volumes. I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.
        Retric 9y ago
        But what's the point of having large structures in space without people? We can already get big stuff into space aka building sized, so you're taking about mega structures which seem rather pointless right now.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    If everyone consumed like an American we’d need something like 4x Earths. There are not enough resources on this planet unless westerners start scaling back their consumption and members of developing societies scale their ambitions down to match the new, lower consumption models of the West.
    - jotm 9y ago
      There's enough resources (especially since they don't just disappear and can be recovered by recycling), afaik, except for food - that's what we're consuming too fast to replenish.
    - Asdfbla 9y ago
      Then making that consumption sustainable and reducing waste would be a far better investment than pipe dreams of asteroid mining. Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Where do you see the profit? I would think precious metals get a lot less precious if they start falling out of the sky and I am pretty skeptical about other Earthside uses being profitable at all. People that go try to live in space are going to have a hard time of it so I wouldn't expect profit from supplying space industry either (the longer missions cosmonauts and astronauts have completed have had grave physical consequences, we aren't adapted to low g environments).
  - encrystation 9y ago
    There's probably lots of neat uses for gold at the moment that aren't financially viable due to the cost of the raw material.
    - mmjaa 9y ago
      Not to mention that the idea of things just falling out of the sky when we need them sounds great to me. Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        It's less fun when you realize that being able to drop any meaningful amount of material from space is equivalent to having a weapon of mass destruction. (This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
      - Neutrion 9y ago
        Also the disruption brought by let huge objects falling through the sky will be devastating to atomsphere.
        mmjaa 9y ago
- legitster 9y ago
  Except it's hard to argue that Elon Musk does anything for profit. Both Tesla and SpaceX are examples of businesses set up to disrupt an industry and worry about money later.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    I agree that he does not see the value of using money as a scoring system for his success, but making a profit, I am sure he is very interested in that. Profitable ventures are how he had the $100 million to create SpaceX. Profits of venture after venture until he acquired enough capital to actually start and fund a new aerospace company and be the largest investor in Tesla.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  There is no profit to be had right now in mining stuff in space and sending it down to Earth. There is however plenty of profits to be made in space, when we'll have a full space economy. Asteroid mining is an important part of both the future economy and of the current process of bootstrapping that economy. The idea is to use material mined in space, combined with manufacturing and processing in space, to create products and resources to be used in space, for space operations. Ultimately some of that may return to Earth, but the main goal is to avoid spending money on lifting things from Earth.
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    Low gravity (e.g. the moon) and zero gravity environments could have manufacturing advantages that are used to create projects that are shipped to earth.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      In the longer term, yes; right now, nothing game-changing on the horizon. The best example would be the work of Made In Space[0]. They've started manufacturing optical fiber on the ISS, where they can reach much greater medium purity than what one can do on Earth. It can, in principle, make fiber optics installations cheaper (less need for repeaters along the way), but the savings are entirely eaten by launch costs (and lack of economies of scale). The primary output of asteroid mining and space manufacturing will naturally be utilized in space, because we need to bootstrap a pretty large and self-sustaining economy to be able to profitably ship useful quantities of useful stuff downwell. -- [0] - http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/ http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/
    - le-mark 9y ago
      Low or zero gravity can also be a hindrance; how do you mine an asteroid if every wack of the pickaxe also propels you away from said asteroid? Clearly asteroids won't be mined with pickaxes, this is an illustration that gravity is in fact critical for all known terrestrial manufacturing processes! When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important. Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.
hprotagonist 9y ago
How else are we going to get that chunk of iron bolted onto Izzy before the moon detonates? ;-) Then we can make Jeff Bezos go get us a comet...
- bhhaskin 9y ago
  That didn't end well for pretty much everyone involved.
  - hprotagonist 9y ago
    It took me until the end of part II to understand the book title. Then i think i actually cursed out loud.
    - jf 9y ago
      (In case anybody is wondering, these comments are referring to the excellent book "Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson)
      - carapace 9y ago
        (Oh man, I think it was a stinker. I'm a big Stephenson fan and I was really disappointed. Just one point: It was so freighted with exposition and so thin on dialog and character development, "show, don't tell" was out the window.)
        hprotagonist 9y ago
        i liked the first 2/3 in an analytical hard sci-fi kind of way. The last third had some interesting world-building, but was less my speed.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
If you mean the Belt, then not really. The current iterator of asteroid mining will focus on near-Earth asteroids primarily, as they're close - exactly what you need for testing and for building a cislunar economy.

zaroth 9y ago

Not sure if overshot is the right word, I read the final burn was programmed to just empty the tanks, and they would get however far they could.

craig1f 9y ago
This is true. The engines overperformed and they're going a lot further than they meant to. This is better than anticipated news. It's only bad if you're REALLY focused on the Tesla "going to Mars", which it was never really going to do, because it would need to slow down once it got to Mars to stay in orbit around it. What we've done is prove capability. Getting to Mars is 100% possible, and we've also proven fault tolerance ... that is, we have enough fuel to spare that we can make correction-burns if necessary during the trip to Mars.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I wonder if the right transfer orbit, combined with a gravity assist, could put something into Mars orbit without further thrust. Really itching to install some Kerbal Space Program mods and try to figure it out...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I was thinking of right transfer orbit combined with exactly right aerobraking, though I'm not sure if Mars has a dense enough atmosphere even if you were aiming for a flyby 1 millimeter above the surface (and that's assuming an indestructible Roadster)...
    - scrumbledober 9y ago
      From Musk's talk on the BFR he says the atmosphere of mars will be sufficient to remove 99% of the ship's momentum before the rockets kick in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQ0jBKH36Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQ0jBKH36Y
    - stcredzero 9y ago

manaskarekar 9y ago

Is there any simulation for projecting the path of the Roadster over its life? Kerbal Space Program? Is it going to orbit the Sun? I'm curious to know what happens on its orbit over time. Could it collide somewhere down the line? Perhaps SpaceX just launched the first man made Planet? EDIT: Would love to hear the downvoter's reasons.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Is there any simulation for projecting the path of the Roadster over its life? Not public, no. > Is it going to orbit the Sun? Yes. > Could it collide somewhere down the line? Yes, but unlikely in the next couple million years. > Perhaps SpaceX just launched the first man made Planet? A planet has a definition involving size and shape, which the Roadster does not fit.
- manaskarekar 9y ago
  > Yes, but unlikely in the next couple million years. So, the reason I asked was because of not having a source. Did this come from SpaceX or someone authoritative who has done the math? > A planet has a definition involving size and shape, which the Roadster does not fit. That was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I know, correctness > humor.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > So, the reason I asked was because of not having a source. Did this come from SpaceX or someone authoritative who has done the math? SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0.
    - manaskarekar 9y ago
      > SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0. But one of the reasons I asked was not because I was worried about whether it would hit something on a short timescale (even though there is a non-zero chance it could happen). I'm aware of the vastness of space. I was curious about what happens over 10, 10^3, 10^9, 10^12, 10^100 orbits later.

lukateake 9y ago

It's set off a catastrophic chain-reaction of collisions in the asteroid belt. You've killed us all, Elon! /sarcasm

NathanKP 9y ago

One question I had about the Tesla launch that wasn't clear is whether the car was thoroughly sanitized prior to sending it up. My understanding is that any object that has the potential to reach another planet has to be thoroughly sterilized to avoid inadvertently introducing Earth organisms to another planet. The chances are technically low but it is theoretically possible and its why NASA has a dedicated page on "planetary protection": https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/technology/insituexploration/planetaryprotection/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/technology/insituexplorati... My hope is that the SpaceX people did the same for this Tesla. Otherwise it would be rather reckless especially since now it is clear there wasn't a specific controlled orbit path, just a burn to launch it as far as possible, and now its possible it could end up impacting something and potentially contaminating it with Earth organisms.

Eire_Banshee 9y ago
This isnt a real concern... right? Like... of all of the things to worry about in a rocket launch.
- bicubic 9y ago
  Very real concern. A lot of effort goes into sterilising craft intended to land on or impact other planets. If we fail to do so, we run a real risk of seeding earth life on those planets and forever ruining our chances to test them for the existence of life prior to contamination.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    Not everyone sees that as a problem.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      While not everyone likely sees seeding Earth life on another planet as a problem, I think most would want to know if life existed there prior to that, since it helps us answer quite a few fundamental problems.

SirLJ 9y ago

Steve Wozniak: ‘I don’t believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says’ Also where exactly this thing is going, do they even know? Just watch knocking few asteroids out of orbit and destroying Earth...

TeMPOraL 9y ago
That comment was really aimed at Tesla, not SpaceX.
- SirLJ 9y ago
  And at Elon in general...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Well, if today you don't believe what Elon says wrt. space then you have to be completely out of touch with reality. I would be surprised of Woźniak dismissed SpaceX.
    - SirLJ 9y ago
      How many times Musk says something and doesn't deliver? Missing Mars and not knowing what are you doing is just the latest example... Musk is where hype goes to die...
      - adventured 9y ago
        Well let's see. He delivered the Roadster. He delivered one of the highest rated, safest, highest performance cars in history with the S. He's delivering the 3. He's very clearly going to deliver on the semi-truck and the new Roadster. He delivered on dramatic battery distance capability for the S and 3, proving a lot of skeptics wrong. There was near universal skepticism that an electric car could do what the S proved it could in terms of distance, until Musk & Co. delivered on that. From early on, few thought Tesla as a business would make it this far. Survival was unexpected, much less thriving. Instead, they're chasing down $15 to $18 billion in sales for fiscal 2018. Up from $3 billion in 2014. And they've completely altered the entire multi-trillion dollar automobile industry, refocusing it nearly entirely on an all-electric future for every automaker. He delivered on the Australian power arrangement. In fact, it has worked so well, Australia is interested in more and bigger arrangements. He delivered on Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and reusable rockets. All of which proved a lot of skeptics wrong. Almost nobody thought SpaceX would pull off reusable rockets in the beginning. All in all, extraordinarily embarrassing for the people that have repeatedly doubted Musk. His batting average is tremendous when it comes to actually delivering, this is especially true given the nature of the things in question.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago

one of the twitter astronomers says this orbit might be unstable because of jupiter: https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/961085386650017798 https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/961085386650017798 Does that mean it will inevitably be pulled into a high gravity object and crash? Or does that mean it will just travel wildly through space?

gbrown 9y ago
Hopefully it gets grabbed by Jupiter and ejected from the solar system. That would be awesome.
- dpkonofa 9y ago
  More than likely it's going to get ejected within the sun's gravity well and will slowly get pulled into the sun where it will cease to exist.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Can you imagine an alien species finding that car, it would be hilarious. Then they find us and bring us free Dont panic T-shirts.

bmcusick 9y ago

Uber, but for Ceres

odammit 9y ago

I wonder what the chances are of it bumping off something and eventually crashing back into earth in a few hundred/thousand years.

DroidX86 9y ago
Astronomically low
odammit 9y ago
How dare I wonder.

banderman 9y ago

What are the odds of this being intentional? They had what, 140k pounds of potential payload? And all they sent up was a car?

jmhobbs 9y ago
Wikipedia says 140k to LEO, 37k to Mars and 7k to Pluto. Still, there's excess capacity there if a roadster is about 3k. Does seem like they sent it as far out as they could with that payload.
- Flammy 9y ago
  Note: those are in pounds too, like OPs comment. These numbers are on SpaceX's website.
- astrocat 9y ago
  the other thing is you're looking at max distance with full recovery of all cores (despite the failure to recover the middle core). If you went fully expendable on all cores you'd get a LOT more payload a LOT further.

MechEStudent 9y ago

The goal is to open the inner solar system for human habitation and resourcing. I'm betting there is a robot on the craft, and its aiming for Ceres. Lets see if the mounting pedestal comes back with enough Iridium to pay for the development and launch of the FH.

hrasyid 9y ago

So fast? Noob question, is the Mars orbit actually that close? How fast is the car moving?

danaliv 9y ago
No, this is a projection. It takes months to get to Mars with rocket technology.
- hrasyid 9y ago
  Ah, that makes sense. Not sure if I misunderstood because I'm a lousy reader, or because the headlines are intentionally misleading.
  - danaliv 9y ago
    It's just rocket science. ;)

alistproducer2 9y ago

Am I wrong in thinking that this is the first time we have seen hi-def video of the earth from this distance?

matte_black 9y ago

How long is the video feed of the Tesla Roadster supposed to last? It'd be cool to see how a car looks like after several years of drifting around in space.

umeshunni 9y ago
In the news conference they said the battery was expected to last only 12 hours
- matte_black 9y ago
  Aw crap, they couldn’t have put a low power time lapse camera at least? Maybe even solar charging. Whatever, they’ll be other launches I suppose.

woodandsteel 9y ago

A friend of mine who works at Tesla says the reason they put the roadster on top of the Falcon Heavy is they wanted to test how well the self-driving system works in outer space. It looks like it still needs some tweaks.

King-Aaron 9y ago
I'd be interested in seeing the crash test results when it slaps into the side of an asteroid at 13,600 m/s Hopefully the dummy has a few G sensors on board...

matte_black 9y ago

When does SpaceX plan to put something down on Mars now, seeing as how they have proven they could reach Mars?

nodesocket 9y ago

Question I've been wondering about for the giant Tesla advertisement is if they had to make any modifications to the roadster to support being in space? The background space temperature is -455 F and obviously also zero gravity.

mlevental 9y ago
in the post launch presser musk says no changes were made
- nodesocket 9y ago
  At -455 F, wouldn't the glass windshield crack? Metal body suffer from freezing? What am I missing?