Space Tesla Arrives At The Cape
A Red Car for the Red Planet https://t.co/PakS3rvp5C pic.twitter.com/440bvUHJeO
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 22, 2017
Keith’s note: Elon Musk could have some serious citizen science fun with this. I was thinking back to the ISEE-3 Reboot Project and all of the amateurs – many with home made satellite dishes – who listened for the spacecraft. If the #SpaceTesla does actually make it into space it would be an enticing object for amateurs to track – and analyze. It has known exterior characteristics. How much of its adaptation to space over time could be gleaned from citizen science observations? Not that a sports car with red paint is your ideal space craft. But if it is out there, why not use it as a thing to entice people to look up at the sky and figure out what it is doing? Maybe SpaceX could put a transponder on it. Has NASA discussed anything like this with SpaceX? This is the sort of thing a spacecraft in orbit around Mars should try and image …
I was thinking having kids create a time capsule and sticking it in the frunk. Retrieve it in a few hundred years.
Or at least a block of cheese.
Venezuelan Beaver Cheese, of course.
There should be a china teapot in the trunk. It’s a philosophical imperative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Hahahah, that’s a great idea.
That puts into amazing perspective how big the area under the fairing is, doesn’t it? Which may be part of the point.
I agree; the volume of the fairing seems vast. Imagine it filled with an actual satellite. Presumably the roadster will remain attached to the upper stage to provide guidance and communications. Of course, it’s a little bizarre to launch a car into space, but you can’t argue with the marketing angle. It seems unlikely there will be any attempt to decelerate into orbit around Mars, since the Falcon upper stage would have long since lost its propellants due to boiloff.
Maybe don’t need propellant to drop into orbit at mars.
https://www.scientificameri…
No matter what tricks of orbital navigation someone comes up with, it is navigation. It doesn’t look like they have added the rockets, propellent, attitude control and communications systems for that. You need all that for the small (sometimes under 0.01 m/s) trajectory correction maneuvers required for navigation.
Navigation is determination of one’s position & velocity. Guidance is calculation of needed maneuvers. Control is execution of those maneuvers. If one uses external tracking (as opposed to onboard sensors requiring attitude changes) then thrusters are not required for ‘navigation’.
That might be true of certain low Earth orbit applications, but not for a planetary spacecraft.
Beyond a fraction of an AU, communications with an omnidirectional antenna just isn’t viable. That means a directional antenna, which means attitude control. Even if you do that with reaction wheels, you still ending up needing thrusters for the occasional wheel desaturation.
In addition, you need thrusters for trajectory correction maneuvers. No launch vehicle puts its payload on exactly the desired orbit. A Falcon 9 putting something on a geostationary transfer orbit, for example, has an advertised apoapsis delivery accuracy of 500 km (at three sigma, if anyone cares.) That’s 1.4%, which isn’t too bad. But for a transfer to Mars, a 1.4% uncertainty translates to 3 million kilometers.
The usual practice is to track the spacecraft, determine how far off its orbit (and how far off it is from the desired one), and then plan and execute a maneuver to correct for the errors. That’s usually repeated at least once during cruise. And I don’t see how you’re going to change the spacecraft’s velocity without thrusters (and attitude control…) If you don’t do that, you could easily miss Mars by a great distance or (possibly worse) hit the planet.
Regardless, I was a little loose about terminology for navigation, orbital determination, maneuver planning and execution, etc. I’m used to the JPL terminology, and they tend to have their own way of saying things. (E.g. navigation and orbital determination are done by a “navigation” team, while attitude control is done by a different group.)
NASA’s Planetary Protection Office would scream bloody murder if he put that roadster with all its Earth germs in orbit around Mars. I imgaine they are not very happy about it being in Solar orbit as it is.
PP can even require long-term propagation of the solar orbit to ensure you don’t hit Mars anytime soon (requirement was 50 years back in 2000).
Intriguing article. Could Elon be planning to sneak this un-clean payload into high Martian orbit “accidentally”? It seems on the surface like he wants to overshoot as a proof of concept (“a later launch date and we could have hit Mars”), and then a launch delay causes Mars to just reach out and grab it anyway…to cause FH added fame and put multiple paid Mars payloads on multiple FH rockets in the launch window two years from now?
Is there any chance that the Tesla Roadster’s ballistic coefficient and thermal protection is suitable for a Mars aerocapture / re-entry? 🙂
The two fairing halves have not been joined together yet and are separated by several feet, as well as being currently situated somewhat side to side, acting sort of as a backdrop in the photos and creating the illusion at first glance in some camera angles of a cavernous volume. Once the fairings are joined together the space will be much narrower. Although still room vertically to stack several more roadsters on top of this one.
Thusly:
https://instagram.fadl1-1.f…
It is 17′ outside, 15′ inside.
2008 Tesla Roadster
13 ft L x 6 ft W x 4 ft H
2,877 lbs
It would have fit horizontally, so it would seem they have it angled up just because it looks cool that way
I don’t see the mission for FH. The fairing is the same as F9. Maybe room for 2 14,000lb GTO, but it does not come up to the max weight. A fast trip to Mars if there is enough fuel in the 2nd stage. The center engine is being throttled back. If it was shut down it might go into orbit also, then TMI and a real fast trip if there is any way to go into orbit there. If anyone wanted to do that. USAF has a 28,000lb need. Maybe direct to GSO.
Musk has had to make some quick and dirty decisions over the years. Many of the more valuable DOD payloads are just beyond the capability of the F9 so he needed something more powerful, and the fastest way to demonstrate capability for the full DOD mission was to go to three boosters. Bezos, with the benefit of a few years to study the situation, is going for a slightly larger LOX/methane booster with the Glenn that can lift any current DOD payload with a single booster, and Musk appears to be resizing the “MCT” to be in the same class.
Put a life size Marvin The Martian in the drivers seat.
So, wait–did they go through the process of changing the FAA license from aluminum or concrete mass dummy to roadster?
Who says they have to change the license? For all we know, the Tesla was in the original paperwork they filed. But it’s extremely safe to assume they have all the required licenses. This is just a little bit too high-profile for the FAA to miss. NASA and the Air Force wouldn’t support a launch if the FAA called up and said it wasn’t licensed.
What about the license on the car? Do they have to change that? Where’s it going to be registered?
It’s completely legal to drive with out of state tags.
OK…you guys made my day with that little exchange. I did see someone on Twitter ask if the epic opportunity to put something cool on the license plates would be exploited.
Too small for amateur telescopes or to pick up on radio I think. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit. I don’t see how Mars could have a sat. with a billion year orbit. A fly by and then a Sun orbit, yes. It would have to leave the Solar System to be that long. Does not sound good for my Mars free return mission. Anoushi Anasori could afford it. She was paying for a Soyuz free return around the Moon(Court case). She would have been the most famous person for awhile.
Technically, I guess its a Mars-Transfer orbit. An elliptical orbit around the Sun with its apogee at Mars-orbit distance and its perigee at earth-orbit distance. Of course, the timing (or lack of it) is such that neither Mars nor Earth would be at that particular point in their orbit at the same time as the roadster.
I think it is a Mars free return orbit. Earth, Mars, Venus, Earth.
What about if they activated the high beam headlights and emergency flashers? Would telescopes pick it up then?
Maybe. I know of an amateur that has a 3′ D. mirror. Look at what telescopes do to asteroids as they pass Earth. Not much. Radar does good. Maybe before TMI.
That would be epic. 🙂
How much g-loading will the car experience?
How long does a Tesla battery last if you are only using the headlights and radio?
I tried to rough it out when the story about the Tesla payload came out. There are too many possibilities for a good estimate. But we’re talking days to a month or so. If you just want to have a carrier wave detectable by one of NASA’s 70-m antennas, you might stretch it out to two months. If you want broadcast music to every good amateur radio astronomer in the word, the batteries would probably be dry within a day. (This assumes omnidirectional broadcasting, since I see no sign of a high gain antenna or attitude control systems in that image. It also assumes the Tesla will separate from the second stage.)
What power are you figuring for the transmitter going into the omni? Wouldn’t a watt be sufficient?
I may have been pessimistic, since I was assuming something like 100 W input. That was from scaling down from the MarCO transmitter (35 W input, 26 dBi worth of patch antenna, and 8 kbps from Mars.) And assuming you’d need a few hundred bps for ranging.
A better comparison might be the Huygens probe, which was tracked from Earth (with big radio telescopes) and they got line-of-sight velocity with 1 m/s accuracy. That was 82 W (input) and only 5 dBi of antenna gain, fro 9 AU. Scaling from that, 1 W would probably give a detectable carrier out to about half an AU. But I don’t think you can do ranging with just a carrier, and I’d worry about the line-of-sight velocity, since frequency stability would be an issue over weeks or months.
You might be reading too much into “radio”. Because of your background, you are picturing a transmitter. Everyone else (including Musk’s tweet) presumably is picturing a car stereo.
Keith did kick this off with a comment about “Maybe SpaceX could put a transponder on it.” I was speculating about whether or not that would be possible. Aside from engaging amateur radio astronomers (there are some), that has the practical value of determining delivery accuracy. I think the numbers put that within the realm of possibility. Just put an omnidirectional antenna on the door, a transponder in the passenger seat and plug it in.
Actually broadcasting “Space Oddity” would be cool, but I don’t think there’s enough power for that, and it would raise FCC licensing and copyright issues.
As a practical matter, would automotive lithium batteries (soon to be “flight proven”) add to the performance of future planetary rovers?
I don’t know about automotive batteries in particular, but lithium ion batteries in general are a huge benefit to spacecraft. They have become the standard for small spacecraft such as cubesats. Even for single-use applications (e.g. proposed, Huygens-like atmospheric probes) they are eclipsing primary (non-rechargeable) batteries. It’s the commercial demand for more watt-hours in a small package, whether it’s a smartphone or a car. That’s driven the state of the art, to the point where they are the best choice for any application requiring batteries. (Although you do have concerns over managers thinking of the Boeing 787 or Samsung Galaxy Note 7…)
Although I don’t know what sort of batteries they are using, consider the Dragonfly mission concept (recently selected for further study as a Discovery mission.) It’s a Titan flying rover. Basically a quad-rotor drone (well, dual quad-rotor, whatever that means.) The basic operating cycle would be to fly for a few hours and tens of kilometers on batteries, land, spend the rest of a Titan day (16 terrestrial days) making observations and using a RTG to recharge the batteries, and repeating that sequence. Clearly, anything that lets them store the required energy in a smaller, lighter battery is a major benefit.
The Tesla roadster battery design hasn’t been tested for operation in a vacume (so far as has been released anyway). For that matter neither have the headlights or music player. Expectations for longevity, therefore, probably contain way too many variables to set any expectations other than instant failure the moment the fairing opens.
People have flown commercial, off the shelf lithium ion batteries. They’ve generally worked reasonably well. Of course, there is no reason why they couldn’t swap them out for something more space-rated.
I suspect they will want to transmit after separation. A few days to a week of tracking will pin down the Falcon Heavy’s delivery accuracy to planetary transfer orbits. That’s a good thing to learn from a test flight.
It’s not going to be orbiting Mars. It will be in a Hohmann transfer orbit cycling between Mars and Earth. At least according to this Business Insider article, which also has more photos.
http://www.businessinsider….
Phil Platte got that much detail out of Elon in a phone call (see Phil’s blog on Slate). The roadster is headed for Mars’ orbit, not Mars orbit…with hyphen. Here…I’ll coin a new expression…”Mars Hyphenated Orbit”. We’ll see if it sticks. 😉
Apostrophe.
Oh, your right. Well, “Mars Apostrophized Orbit” then. 😉
You’re.
Apostrophised Mars Orbit. Since the subject of the apostrophe is Mars, not the orbit.
But Mars’ orbit is that of the planet around the sun. The car won’t be in that orbit, it will just be in an eccentric orbit between Earth’s orbit and Mars’ orbit. Or between Earth’s orbit and beyond Mars’ orbit, similar to Apollo or Amor asteroids.
If its orbital period is a whole fraction of Mars’ orbital period, then it will be a Mars cycler orbit. But I doubt they will have the accuracy to hit that, given the car can’t manoeuvre.
Ya, I’m just getting kinda sick of seeing the news media (some of whom are sources that should know better) call the target “Mars Orbit”. It ain’t gonna be orbiting the planet…just proving that FH can reach Mars, if launched into the intercept window.
I’m convinced that this started folks who know better using an imprecise phrase when speaking with those who don’t.
Anyone interested in space knows that car ain’t going into orbit, and knows the reasons; this allows the loose usage of the phrase to indicate Mars’ orbit around the sun.
And: I wrote a newspaper column for more than eight years. Eight hundred words a week, until the paper was purchased by USA Today and all columnists weren’t fired; the paper simply stopped responding to email. Nice.
During that time I learned a few things about the biz, as they say.
Journalists by and large are so pressed for time that actually understanding a subject is not going to be possible. It’s that simple, really. A person covering a particular area for, say, a decade, starts to get a serious feel for a subject, and is able to contextualize.
This is why you can pick up a NYTimes, LATimes, or similar, and expect to get nuanced stories. It’s also why local news is a preening shitshow.
When you see a post here, or Vox, or Spaceflightnow, Daringfireball, Ars, AvNow — you know the writer has the scars to prove he’s been covering the stories for a long time.
But that’s not who writes most ‘news’ stories. Mostly it’s younger people under tremendous pressure for the ‘story’. And much of the time they generate story ideas themselves. Editors are few, and assignment editors rare birds.
Nowadays, it’s much, much worse, because the internet has created false equality. Anyone can run a website, so folks find the ones with the screaming headlines that are congruent with their own, ill-informed view. It’s how alt-right and WSJ become conflated.
Argh.
Sorry.
Feasibility Analysis for a Manned Mars Free-Return Mission in …
http://www.aiaa.org/uploadedFiles/...…
Trajectory . o A 501-day “free- return” Mars flyby passing within a hundred miles of the surface • Only small correction maneuvers are needed during transit It goes to Mars, Venus,Earth. It looks like the Mars free return mission. 500 days. If they have the same distance, speed, timing at Mars of course. It is possible that the mission will happen with or with out crew. They have time to install the crew tower and arm. Musk has not denied that is what he is doing. The launch date is Jan. 5 which is about the time FH is suppose to launch. Why doesn’t someone ask him? Too ridiculous? The date and destination and orbit fits. There is a 2 week LEO checkout. So they have a 2 week launch window. Paragon is part of this and they have invented a way to slow down boil off. So there will be ox for TMI. Pipe the high pressure ox to the capsule to breath with what is left. Just happens that since FH delays from 2013 is going to launch near Mars free return day? Or with a little change the orbit could be anything.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
The other link did not work.Do a search and it works. See if the video works. There is one for 2022 also about 2 months longer. FH has 2x the lift since this came out.
Actually, that doesn’t fit. The “[o]nly small correction maneuvers are needed during transit” part is going to kill you. The Tesla in the images doesn’t have the antenna, attitude control or propulsion systems for those small correction maneuvers.
In any case, a Falcon Heavy can only provide 6 km/s of hyperbolic excess velocity (C3 of 36 km^2/s^2) to a 1300 kg payload (the mass of a Tesla Roadster.) I checked, and I can’t find a high energy trajectory that goes from an early January launch to Mars itself, with only 36 km^2/s^2. If they expended the side and core stages, that might be possible. But Mr. Musk and SpaceX have repeatedly says they will attempt recovery.
Mr. Musk has also said something about his Tesla orbiting for a billion years. That doesn’t sound like a plan to get it back in 500 days. Everything we know is consistent with launching the thing to a solar orbit with an apohelion which crosses the orbit of Mars.
I’m not clear — are you speculating that the mission could be manned?
Now THAT would be cool. But likely impossible unless he’s keeping some very big secrets from a lot of observers.
At the very least, he’ll want to put the roof up.
Lit!
As an illustration of the progress that Elon Musk is making toward affordable space flight, this vehicle costs less than twenty percent of the price of the previous electric cars launched from Pad 39A!
– that fairing is H-U-G-E, even after adjusting for perspective.
I see that the bird is vertical at the Cape as of this morning’s news.
Quite a sight.
I’m anxiously awaiting a high res photo from SpaceX of the vertical Falcon Heavy.
Maybe this was mentioned elsewhere and I missed it, but does SpaceX have a test stand in McGregor capable of testing FH’s first stage and boosters at once?
No. The first test firing of all 27 Merlins will happen in Florida and supposed to be with a week or two.
I couldn’t find the answer to that question.
I will add that the more I learn about the complexities of three rockets strapped together the more I get how difficult it is. This is another case of what I call “seem like”: as in “seems like they oughta just strap on another booster to each side”. It’s much more difficult.
And then lowered again after less than a day. Hmm.
https://spaceflightnow.com/…
I *have* a red sports car. Well, sort of – a Pilgrim Bulldog Mk III kit car, rather like a 1930s MG, but largely made of fibreglass. I have to tell you that UV mediated by Earth’s dense atmosphere has taken a terrible toll on the colouring agents, and that Elon Musk’s car will – if the materials behave remotely in the same way under raw Solar UV – pretty quickly become bright pink… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I suppose it would be a bit morbid, but maybe they should consider placing a cadaver in the driver’s seat. Then future generations a few thousand years from now could wonder how someone drove their car into space.