31–40 of 48 posts
Maybe I am not reading this right. However, it seems he wants to put a Tesla Roadster in orbit of Mars? If so, that is a terrible idea. Our own planet has so much space junk floating around that it is becoming unmanageable and actually harming future launches. Why ruin the orbit of another planet? I certainly hope this car has some sort of de-orbiting mechanism.
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Given the lack of a powered descent mechanism I'm thinking it'll be more of a crater surrounded by bits of aluminum, plastic, and lithium. Personally I think it would be funnier to put a Tesla into an eccentric comet-like solar orbit. That way future generations could train their telescopes upon the return of the... car.
So much, this. I've also been imaging a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise encounters and picks up a Tesla from deep space. :D
An actual Russell’s Teapot ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot ) would have been a good addition to the solar system, but this is even better.
Must be china though. I suggest a white porcelain Melitta teapot. ;)
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You really, really don't want to put fuel and oxidizer where they don't belong. If you run fuel lines to the cargo compartment and something goes wrong with the mission halfway to Mars, it would be much more difficult to figure out whether the incident was caused by a fault in the rocket's design or by the one-off modifications.
I may be reading this wrong, but I thought he meant as spare resources for once we do get to Mars, not as extra fuel for the rocket itself.
I thought that was because we don’t want to contaminate space.
So all these clean-room precautions that you normally see when people work on satellites are what for again? I thought that was because we don’t want to contaminate space.
If it was about contaminating space they probably wouldn’t leave so much junk there.
Musk is becoming unhinged. If Tesla is to survive, he needs to resign (or be removed) from the Tesla CEO role. That would free him up to focus exclusively on SpaceX.