2018 to be a Busy Year in Space

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That's something to see a distorted reflection of the Earth on the side of the roadster. The part of the rotation where the sun glares again with the assorted lens flare is uncanny. I don't know if the occasional "particles" whizzing by are just camera illusions, processing artifacts, or actual space debris. Should certainly be plenty of the latter that's accumulated up there.

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[Yazata]

Reports coming out of SpaceX say that the central core crashed while it was attempting to land on the 'drone-ship' in the Atlantic. Word is that the three rocket engines necessary for the landing failed to all ignite and the thing hit at 300 mph. Dunno if it hit the ship or the ocean. (That's why the drone ship is unmanned, I guess.)

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/169809...ed-landing

Nevertheless, SpaceX had a very good day.

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I don't know if the occasional "particles" whizzing by are just camera illusions, processing artifacts, or actual space debris. Should certainly be plenty of the latter that's accumulated up there.

My guess is that it's coming from the vehicle.

The car is still attached to the second stage booster, I think. The booster is still due to light up one last time to take the car out of geostationary orbit (up high where communications satellites like to live) and inject it into its interplanetary transfer orbit to Mars. (I think that's why they keep showing the second stage rocket engine. It should be running once again in a little while.) So the thing the car is attached to still has fuel and oxidizer in it. The latter is liquid oxygen so it's very cold. So I'm guessing that the rocket had ice on it when it launched and that's what's coming off now in little bits as the Sun warms the thing up.

I remember Mercury and Gemini astronauts exclaiming about the bright little particles they saw outside their capsules. I think that turned out to be ice too.

(Subsequent Edit) I was just looking at the live video of the car and I thought several things were going on. Camera flares obviously. Some specks stayed in the same place even as the car rotated, so I think that there's crud on the lens. A few things slowly moved in the scene at the speed of rotation, so they may be brighter stars or planets relatively fixed in the sky at this time scale. And things that moved faster than the rotation, which I think come off the vehicle and are probably ice.

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Here's somebody who spoke to Musk after the launch reporting on his remarks. Musk says the middle core hit the ocean about 100 meters from the ship it was supposed to land on and sprayed it with shrapnel. That's all Musk really knows at this point. He apparently thinks the problem was that it ran out of fuel and couldn't complete the landing. Musk has other interesting things to say, including that SpaceX spent $500 million developing this thing, all internally funded (no government $). He says that they don't plan to fly humans to the Moon or Mars using it. The company plans to devote all of its resources to building its visionary 'BFR', the real honest-to-God spaceship able to fly humans anywhere in the Solar System.

Musk on flying humans to the Moon and Mars: "Will use BFR for that. Spaceship is hard part. Short hop tests maybe next year. Full up Earth orbital test of system in 3-4 years. Moon not long thereafter."

That's pretty ambitious. The 'BFR' spaceship is huge, big enough to carry hundreds of people. (With decks, cabins, a control room and a cargo hold.) If they plan to start flying it (without its booster) next year, they must already be building it somewhere. (Or Elon was feeling his oats after today's success and was speaking "aspirationally" again... expressing what he'd like to do.)

https://twitter.com/SpcPlcyOnline

[Yazata]

And here's most of Elon Musk's 'crazy things can come true!' news conference today after the launch where the above information came from (unfortunately the beginning is cut off). He answers lots of questions about lots of stuff from the tech and aviation press. (Yes, the spacesuit in the car is real. It's one that they used in testing for qualifying the suits. Elon says that it's easy to make spacesuits that look good but don't work. Harder to make ones that work but don't look good. But it's hardest to make ones that both work and look good.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytrrdOPYzA

One new thing: Musk says the BFR second stage (the spaceship) will be capable of launching single-stage-to-orbit without a booster if it isn't heavily laden. Its booster is basically a scaled up Falcon 9 and Elon says they already understand the physics and engineering challenges of that. The spaceship itself is the new thing and the hard part, so they are shifting all of SpaceX's engineering and design talent to working on it. They don't plan any new versions of Falcon 9 beyond the newest block 5 version (optimized for reusability) and all Falcon 9's to be manufactured in the future will be block 5. They don't plan do any new versions of the Falcon Heavy beyond employing block 5 Falcons as its side boosters. And the version 2 'crew' Dragon is the last version of that capsule (even though it hasn't even flown yet).

SpaceX hopes to use the huge new BFR for all their orbital, lunar and interplanetary missions starting in the early 2020's. It's huge but they think it will be very cheap to fly. Like an airline flying and re-flying a 747 airliner, when everyone is used to purchasing a new smaller corporate jet for every trip and only flying it one time. The biggest per-flight cost with the BFR might be fuel, and it runs on methane and oxygen, both cheap.

[Yazata]

Elon Musk's Tesla and its relaxed no-worries driver in a spacesuit was supposed to be headed for an Earth Mars Hohmann transfer orbit. But Musk says that it dramatically overshot and appears to be headed closer to the orbit of Ceres, out in the Asteroid Belt. (That's as far beyond Mars as Earth is from the Sun!)

Elon Musk to Uber driver in spacesuit: "Are you sure this is the right way?"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/961083704230674438

But... Jonathan McDowell doesn't think that the orbital mechanics add up, given the numbers in Elon's twitter post. He thinks somebody's making an error somewhere. (Elon's C3 value is probably off. The one Elon gave seems to be the one they intended and overshot.)

(geek vs geek in a battle of sliderules!)

https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/96...5569564672

[Yazata]

Jonathan McDowell thinks that the Tesla should be passing the Moon's orbit around now.

https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/96...3511315456

It should leave the Earth's gravitational sphere of influence (its Hill sphere) on Friday. That's the distance inside of which an object will orbit a larger object. So after Friday, the Tesla will officially be in orbit around the Sun.

[Yazata]

To Infinity and Beyond.

An endless road-trip.

Jonathan McDowell says a SpaceX engineer tells him that the Tesla remains attached to the spent second stage, so it didn't separate like in the animation.

https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/96...3450830849

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[Yazata]

The red roadster has exceeded its warranty miles.

It's 1,716,800 miles away from Earth, and that's rising fast.

http://www.whereisroadster.com/index.html

Here's one of the used ("flight-proven") Falcon Heavy side boosters returning to SpaceX's hanger at Cape Canaveral. It's all sooty from the reentry and landing burns, less so on top where the cold LOX tank makes it harder for soot to stick. There's a distinct dividing line where there's a bulkhead dividing the LOX tank from the kerosine fuel tank, where the soot sticks and the vehicle is superficially blackened. (It washes off.)

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One of the SpaceX engineers says that the BFR will use methane instead of kerosine as fuel. Liquid methane is cryogenic (cold) like LOX, so soot shouldn't stick anywhere. Besides, methane burns a lot cleaner and makes less soot.

https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/681556076731351040

Here's an interesting paper just submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by some astrophysicists from the U. of Toronto who ran a bunch of computer simulations and calculate that the Tesla has roughly a 6% chance of hitting the Earth in the next million years. Over time its orbit will be perturbed by the gravitation of the various planets and the Sun making it harder to predict as time goes on. They say that the fate of the Tesla is very dependent on initial conditions (its dynamical evolution sounds chaotic to me). They conclude that its lifetime should be tens of millions of years.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04718

[Yazata]

SpaceX has put out another Falcon Heavy video showing the preparations, the actual launch, the crowds that turned out at Cape Canaveral to watch, Starman in the red roadster headed to Mars (actually it will pass close to Mars and travel out into the asteroid belt since they overshot), and the booster landings... all to the same David Bowie song that was used in the animation. (SpaceX's new theme-song?) It includes the first video released of what the center core booster looked like crashing at sea.

SpaceX is doing their best to put the fun back in space travel. They have succeeded here, managing to capture the whole world's attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0FZIwab...e=youtu.be

The red roadster and Starman are currently 6,523,000 miles from Earth (more than 20x the Earth-Moon distance).

[Yazata]

Here's Starman's and the Tesla's current position (from Elon Musk's often-interesting twitter page):

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[Yazata]

Photo just in of Starman's latest adventures out in space

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