That can’t be!
They’re mining clean coal, after all.
/s
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Oh. It’s almost like he’s full of shit. Couldn’t be though. I’ve been told he’s a genius. By men.
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Well, but shouldn’t they be shooting cars into space? Isn’t that REAL science? /s
But seriously, it’s stuff like this that’s really cool, if you ask me. What can we do in space that can have real world positive impacts on earth, too.
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Seriously, he could have given some Stanford grad students with JPL leanings the mission: 1500 kg, this orbit. Make a thing. Maybe it’ll blow up. Hurrah!
He could have launched a spy satellite, a giant telescope larger than than Hubble in Earth orbit specialized for terrestrial survey. He could have launched a giant telescope in Earth orbit specialized for space survey.
He launched a car in a big orbit. It’s literally stupid and makes me think he is, himself, stupid and more than a little desperate about seeing out his teenaged vision.
So goes the failed enterprises of the regular people who think wealth (and a dick, maybealiddlebit) makes them magical.
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And… the motherfucking rockets still don’t land.
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I am utterly baffled by Musk-worship. I can only think he has the same kind of charisma as the late unlamented Adolph Schicklgruber, because there’s a whole adoring crowd who think that economics and engineering are somehow being subordinated to his will.
Perhaps it’s his after-shave.
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It was a publicity stunt. He was trying for headlines, and he got them.
Imagine the headlines if something like you describe - which sounds much more expensive than the $90 million rocket it was launched on - got destroyed in the test. “Musk blows up kids’ science project.”
SOP is to just launch blocks of concrete for this kind of test. Musk decided that was boring, and turned the whole exercise into a publicity stunt.
Is it beneficial to humanity to have a car flying in space? Of course not. But it’s beneficial to SpaceX to have their name in the news, and the stunt paid dividends that way.
The two that landed at Cape Canaveral don’t count?
I don’t get the Musk worship, no. But I also don’t get the hate. Your comments, in particular, reflect a hostility that seems out of proportion to “Musk chose a silly payload for the test of his new rocket.”
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His Musk, so to speak?
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If the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.
-Tom Lehrer.
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I don’t have anything against him but his fanboys and the face of shiny idiocy he gives to invention.
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… ?
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I’m not much of a fan of Musk himself, but the Falcon Heavy launch was still extremely impressive considering it was a first attempt for the system, the complexity of the systems involved, the fact that two of the three rockets were able to turn around and make pinpoint landings in a reusable state, the orbits achieved, and the cost savings of the rocket in a reusable mode compared to other options out there.
Having some gorgeous video of the (admittedly, silly) simulation payload in space to drum up interest and get people who don’t geek out on space technology talking about it is far from stupid.
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agreed, but i don’t think the payload is silly… it’s all just WEIGHT – who cares what form the weight is in? why not have it as something people can wrap their heads around and have some emotional attachment to, like an expensive sports car? i think he was savvy to use something that garnered so much attention.
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There is already a growing problem with satellite débris, and because I am a complete killjoy I would like to see a lot of thought put into anything that goes up there. What with secret military satellites and attention-seeking ploys like this one, it would be nice to see a sudden attack of responsibility.
I forget where I read it but it has been suggested that one reason we haven’t heard from “space aliens” is that societies regularly develop orbital capability before they mature and end up with so much junk in orbit that they can’t make further progress.
See also marine pollution, carbon dioxide levels, ozone layer, Fox News and the like.
At least we’re doing a slightly better job with the microwave spectrum. We’ll need to because at some point a ground based version of GPS is likely to become necessary if North Korea joins the other countries with EMP nukes.
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Yep, that’s pretty much what I was saying. 
From a technical standpoint, the car and the various references built in to the whole presentation were silly. From a PR standpoint, as a way to get people who otherwise don’t really care about space talking about it, it was really well done.
They had to send up something, with the weight of an actual real payload but without the cost and without any concern if the whole thing failed.
This thing’s on a solar orbit now that goes all the way out to the asteroid belts, and I believe the parts that were left behind were on paths that would end with re-entry sooner rather than later. With the amount of space that’s out there, it’s pretty unlikely that most of the bits from this mission will be any kind of appreciable increase to the debris problem.
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well yes, and i was echoing it in agreement. 
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There is a growing problem with satellite debris in low Earth orbit.
This thing’s aphelion is pretty much in the asteroid belt. And you know what measures the Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini, etc. missions took to avoid asteroids when passing through the belt? None, because the odds of hitting anything at all are similar to the odds of a pitcher throwing a pitch and hitting a passing bird (it can happen, it will happen if you throw enough pitches, but it takes a stroke of luck that’s so ridiculously bad that it’s not even worth being part of your thought processes when preparing to throw).
Honestly, if satellite debris is your concern, you should be much angrier at these guys:
That satellite will actually be in a place where there’s a statistically non-zero chance that it might hit something.
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Maybe he should be a bit serious, given the red ink. Being a showman is one thing, but it’s sliding into shitshow. Just like Lear, Tesla, Tucker, etc. All heroes of invention, all drowned in general ignominy.
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Oh, I am.
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The point is that every time the ink gets redder or another deadline is missed, he seeks publicity. Model 3 hardly coming off the production line? We’re going to do a semi. Loss increases by more than the increase in revenue? Car in spaaaace!
James Branch Cabell, that keen observer of human folly, has Dom Manuel (in Figures of Earth IIRC) observing the motto of Poictesme Mundus Decipit, change it to Mundus vult decipi.
that is, from “the world deceives” to “the world wants to be deceived”. (I don’t like to insult people’s intelligence by spelling out what they probably already know.)
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