That Elon Musk has stuck a used car up in the Van Allen belt is seen by those mature in the ways of business as a blindingly good piece of advertising.
The rocket had to be tested and no one’s going to put anything valuable on the first shot of a new lifting platform, so why not add $50,000 of old banger to gain worldwide exposure? Seriously, why not? Other such tests of other rockets have been, in the past, simply festooned with scrap metal – and no one watched a live stream of them.
To the sort of people who produce The Guardian, however, this is an outrage. They seem to see it as an argument that individuals, even rich ones, simply shouldn’t be the people off exploring space. That it is something that should be done by “states, communities and united peoples”, in common:
I wonder how many people watched to see an old sports car in space, and how many watched to see whether Musk could avoid a seriously big bang at some point in the flight. I guess he’s ironed virtually all the bugs out, but running out of triethylborane on the centre booster when it tried to land is a bit embarrassing.
About time one of his cars went more than 300 miles on a single charge.
space is not a rubbish dump
@Alex- that’s brilliant.
Bloody fly tippers!
Just to point out that Peter Beck at Rocketlab managed to get a disco ball into orbit a few weeks ago….did Musk just copy his idea?
john malpas,
Space makes a perfect rubbish dump. It’s big, so I’m told, and there isn’t much using it at the moment.
Nothing new under the sun. The spurned superheroine of “My super ex-girlfriend” puts her former boyfriend’s car in LEO.
‘blindingly good piece of advertising.’
What was he advertising? Tesla or SpaceX or Elon Musk?
I just had an hour or so looking at what the NASA bureaucrats have dreamed up as ways to explore space and perhaps more to the point what their version costs…
Why NASA won’t go to Mars seems a neat summary.
Mr Musk actually looks like good value
The last time I recall a State doing something similar they sent a dog up to die in space.
No doubt the Guardian thinks it is better to kill a dog than advertise a car.
“space is not a rubbish dump”
Except when it is.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JmVt92d5bd4
@John Fembup, you do realise that the video doesn’t show the object in space to scale. Tiny particles in a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge amount of space are not a problem.
Just to include an unworthy ad hominem. The GRAUNIAD article Tim refers to is by Vanessa Badham, Vanessa is Australia’s prime exemplar of the Downing Effect, suffering massively from that illusory superiority people with a below-average IQ exhibit in overestimating their own IQ. The list of her banalities and lugubrious stupidities is endless. Hence her regular appearance in The Guardian.
The short retort it that, if it weren’t for the CRS-1 contract to deliver cargo to ISS, SpaceX would have gone out of business in 2008.
HowardP: you mean Dunning-Kruger.
LY: are you saying that in the absence of the ISS there would have been no private rocketry? That’s a rather ambitious counterfactual.
I am saying that SpaceX was out of cash at the height of the Great Recession. NASA awarded SpaceX CRS-1 contracts on December 23th, 2008. With contracts in hand, Musk was able to raise the capital he needed from private sources on Christmas Eve.
https://www.space.com/25355-elon-musk-60-minutes-interview.html