Did I correctly see that the rocket was at a 45-degree angle while still below 5km altitude?
How much will the launch have cost? Was there a reason they went for a PR payload instead of a scientific or commercial one? Was it deemed so risky that payload bids were insignificant?
How scalable is the “more dakka” approach? Could you have 5, 7, 9 boosters? At what point would you start hitting severely diminishing returns?
Don’t Teslas have and Autopilot mode 
Two interesting things from news briefing.
Musk mentioned that some re entry problems scale as the 8th power :eek:
Also, they developed the heavy with about a measly 500 million dollars !
Impressive.
That car should have had curb feelers on it…you never know how much space you are going to have for parking…
The live feed of Starman just ended a few minutes ago, and the third burn, to put it into its deep orbit, is supposed to be in about 20 minutes (21:45 ET). No live view of the burn? Damn it!
I’m thinking of the opening sequence to the original Heavy Metal movie…
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_KXgFpguE0
Unlikely. On the Iridium missions (for example), the booster didn’t reach 45 degrees until ~100 s into flight, at which point it was at 25 km altitude. FH wouldn’t be all that different (not by a factor of 5, at any rate). Sometimes the camera angles can be deceiving.
What does the first flight of anything cost? Hard to count. But they’re charging customers $90M.
Yes, they used a dummy payload basically because it was too risky otherwise. They’d otherwise use a stack of steel plates or the like. Boring.
Musk says they can scale further, but didn’t elaborate much.
You certainly do hit diminishing returns, especially without propellant crossfeed–which they don’t have. Ideally, you can drain pairs of tanks completely, and eject them when depleted, so you always carry minimal tankage (Kerbal Space Program players call this asparagus staging). But crossfeed is really hard and SpaceX doesn’t plan on pursuing it. I imagine that SpaceX considers the Falcon family more or less done (once Block 5 ships), and everything going forward will be on BFR.
First flight of the launch system, I suppose nobody would insure a commercial payload either.
Hey, it IS rocket science, not Kerbal Space Program we’re playing here. As in this is something where a half billion is “measly”.
ETA: I swear Dr. Strangelove’s post wasn’t there when I wrote this!)
Whatever happens with the escape burn and in spite of the core stage loss, this was an outstanding performance. There’s folks in “establishment” space launch shops who dream of a first flight like this.
I know of a better one–incandescent light bulb lifetime scales as roughly the inverse 12th power with respect to voltage.
Still, 8th is crazy. I wonder what is happening there.
Not sure if this link will work, but this should show a bunch of charts with a simulation of the Heavy mission.
From the “velocity angle” graph, you can see that it hits 45 degrees at 118 seconds into flight. And then from the altitude graph, see that it’s 38.8 km up at 118 s.
The charts are a simulation but it’s given very close results for previous missions, so I suspect it’s pretty good.
That was Flash Fucking Gordon.
'twas about time something about the future looked like The Future :p.
BTW, the fact that they had a relatively high altitude for this 45 degree point indicates that they chose a fairly “lofted” trajectory for this mission. This is less efficient (though doesn’t matter here since the payload is light), but reduces aerodynamic stress since goes farther out of the atmosphere before really picking up speed. They were worried about aerodynamic interactions with the side boosters, so it sounds like they tried to make things a bit easier on themselves in this regard.
Emperor Ming will destroy the space car!
No one has mentioned so far that this is very Heavy Metal.
Well finally…we got our flying car! At least 18 years behind schedule…and not quite as practical or cheap as we though…but damn good gas mileage one supposes.
In reference to the 500 million. When I called it measly…I wasn’t be sarcastic. That is cheap IMO.
I remember Musk making the point that PR matters a significant amount when it comes to space. I guess this does a good job of promoting both SpaceX and Tesla.
Interesting graphs, thanks.
Wait. Did they actually use the word “mannequin” in the press conference? If they said “dummy”, that could mean… something else.
Like that.
To put it into context, advertisers spent $419 million on the Super Bowl. So cheap indeed.
According to Elon’s tweet the third burn was successful—and they have exceeded Mars orbit and are heading towards the asteroid belt.
Too bad they didn’t include any way to track the Roadster as it orbits the sun. I think it would be cool to pull up a website and see where it’s located. We’ll have to let the amateur astronomers out there set up something.
Well, NO. They haven’t passed Mars. That would require a sizable percentage of light speed. They’re merely headed in that direction.