Yeah, just wait til his descendants get there and have to deal with the tardigrades overloads.
The booster overboosted so its not going anywhere near Mars and is going directly into the Asteriod belt is my understanding.
Yes and no. It will pass the orbit of Mars twice on every orbit of the Sun. Going out and coming back. Doesn’t mean Mars will be there when it does.
Answering my own question. I found this nice summary.
The answer seems, surprisingly, that there is about a 50/50 chance the roaster will hit the sun within a few tens of millions of years. About a 15% chance it will be ejected from the solar system, and maybe 1% chance it will hit a planet. Overall there is close to zero chance it will survive hundreds of millions or billions of years.
My money goes on it ending up in a museum. Although I would expect that will actually reduce it life expectation dramatically.
What difference does it make is Mars is biologically contaminated? It would be interesting to find out what Earth organisms could thrive there, if any.
If there is any native Martian life, killing it with Earth viruses - or outcompeting it with introduced species - would be a bad thing.
(Emphasis mine.) I love these meaningful typos – yeah, it will definitely be roasting when that happens!
But that is a nice link, thank you. I think I’ve gone from thinking of the roadster/roaster launch as a silly stunt to admiring its PR impact, if it can get conversations like this going. And the proof of the viability of the launch vehicle was obviously very important.
But it’s not going to stay there. It will come back and at some point, possibly decades or centuries from now, come near Mars. More pertinently, until it does crash or is ejected from the solar system, it’s going to be another piece of space junk that has to be tracked and gets in the way of other missions.
Not really. The only junk that matters is in low earth orbit. Even if you tried there is so close to zero chance that you could make something collide with with the roadster (short of active tracking and guidance) that it is just not an issue. The first vaguely near pass is 11 years hence, and from there they get pretty thin on the ground. And by vaguely near we mean sort of in the vicinity in the same way as the moon is “near”.
Never forget, space is big, really, big…
Yeah, if you want to prove your launch vehicle, you need to launch a substantial payload with it. And a fancy-schmancy car (which you incidentally also want to generate publicity for) is just as good for that purpose as a ton of rocks.
Mind you, I’d be a lot happier if he’d instead put a thousand cubesats out there, but given that he’s pretty much doing this whole thing as the world’s most expensive hobby, it’s hard to be mad at him.
Given he gave it a 50/50 chance of making it past the launch tower, before blowing up, I can’t blame him for not wanting to be the guy that tells 100s of cubesat teams worldwide that he vaporised their last year’s work.
Much better if the next launch has payload spare to fit in 100 cube sats with a really good expectation of making into orbit. I know guys that have lost a cubesat. It isn’t the money that mattered. Of course it is part of the deal that you take your chances, but it is still a hit, and losing 1000 at once would be a bad day for cubesats.
Unless I’m being whooshed, do you mean that NASA or some entity would actually go out into space, retrieve the Tesla again, and bring it back specifically for the purpose of museum-ing it? That sounds too expensive for any public or private space program to do.
On the basis that it will be out there for at least a few million years I’m assuming that in at least the next few hundred or thousand years or so we will reach a technological capability where someone would consider grabbing it back and that they could do so with little more effort than Jeff Bezos expended retrieving the F1 engines.
I have some friends who worked on a cubesat, too. They figured that if they completed the satellite and delivered it on time for launch, and it blew up on the way up, that the project was a 90% success. As it turned out, the project… was a 90% success. And they were happy about that, because they had done their part.
Of course, having done that, it was much easier to build the second one, which did successfully make orbit and return data. It still failed earlier than expected, but in a very interesting way, so that was still a success, in that everyone involved learned more about cubesats in the process.
I’m not sure what the transparency problem was… The Tesla’s orbital elements are public knowledge.
That’s the point. The roadster’s orbit was known so the “asteroid” error was quickly found, but it shows how easily other errors could be made if the info is not available.
I surprised they didn’t put a camera on it and send back images every now and then.
Power would be a problem. Musk wouldn’t want to ruin the lines of the roadster by bolting on solar panels.
I’m assuming the car doesn’t have the full complement of lithium cells as the retail model? I’d assume those would eventually degrade and explode (possibly combustively even in a vacuum as I think there is some oxidiser present inside them).