Starship Asterisk*

smitty wrote:
While hating to rain on Elon Musk's parade, I have to say that one thing this Falcon Heavy "demonstration launch" truly demonstrates is just how out of touch billionaires such as Musk are with the real world in which they live. Rather than sending his car into space, Musk could have sold it (for well over $100,000), donated the money to a tutoring program for disadvantaged kids in some inner city, and instead sent an equal weight of some inexpensive payload such as concrete into space. The gulf between the top 1 % and the rest of us apparently is just too wide for the Elon Musks of the world to bridge (or apparently even to see). Sad.

JohnD wrote:
If we must, the simultaneous landing for reuse of the Heavy Falcon boosters was the real story here, even if the main one crashed. They have to be the first real space ships, not just throwaway cans.

JohnD wrote:
It would be a pity if the exemplary and inspiring use of Space by the US so far were to allow overcommercialisation to rule out there.

• I don't even know what that means .

queryman wrote:Where are the background stars in these images?

stevewiggins wrote:It may or may not continue to orbit indefinitely. We don't know the physics behind time - we only exist in the tiniest fraction of it. What we call the present lasts less than one Planck second. How then do you define indefinite?

Bellerophon wrote:
I'd identify the view of Earth behind the roadster as the east coast of Australia, about an hour after launch, so it's morning there. What looks like a narrow peninsula jutting out from the coast I believe to be Fraser Island, about 80 km north of Brisbane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Fraser wrote:

---

<<Fraser Island is named after Eliza Anne Fraser was the wife of Captain James Fraser, master of the Stirling Castle. There were 18 people aboard the ship and a cargo mainly of spirits, which may have been involved in the shipwreck at an island off the coast of Queensland, Australia, on 22 May 1836. They struck a reef hundreds of kilometres north of K'gari. They then launched a longboat and a pinnace, the latter of which landed on the northern side of Waddy Point on K'gari. The 11 survivors split up into two groups, Eliza and her husband in the second group, and attempted to trek south, surviving on pandanus and berries until they reached Hook Point. Eliza later claimed she was captured by the Badtjala (Butchella) people. Many other survivors of the same ship wreck later disputed Eliza's claims of capture and ill treatment. Other white people had previously been taken in by the Badtjala people and had been treated extremely well. Eliza Fraser's claim eventually led to the massacre and dispossession of the island's tribe. Eliza later secretly married another sea captain (Captain Alexander Greene) in Sydney and they both returned to England aboard his ship, the Mediterranean Packet. Controversy followed when she appeared before the Lord Mayor of London to request that a charity appeal be set up for her three children as she was left penniless after her husband had died, not mentioning her marriage to Captain Greene or the £400 received in Sydney by a fund set up to help her.>>

neufer wrote:

smitty wrote:
While hating to rain on Elon Musk's parade, I have to say that one thing this Falcon Heavy "demonstration launch" truly demonstrates is just how out of touch billionaires such as Musk are with the real world in which they live. Rather than sending his car into space, Musk could have sold it (for well over $100,000), donated the money to a tutoring program for disadvantaged kids in some inner city, and instead sent an equal weight of some inexpensive payload such as concrete into space. The gulf between the top 1 % and the rest of us apparently is just too wide for the Elon Musks of the world to bridge (or apparently even to see). Sad.

Elon Musk is going to save us all billions & billions of dollars in launch costs.

The $100,000 you refer to is a tiny fraction (and the best spent fraction) of Tesla's yearly $52 million marketing budget.