Tesla Roadster Elon Musk Launched Into Space Has 6 Percent Chance of Hitting Earth In the Next Million Years (sciencemag.org) 150
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk grabbed the world's attention last week after launching his Tesla Roadster into space. But his publicity stunt has a half-life way beyond even what he could imagine -- the Roadster should continue to orbit through the solar system, perhaps slightly battered by micrometeorites, for a few tens of millions of years. Now, a group of researchers specializing in orbital dynamics has analyzed the car's orbit for the next few million years. And although it's impossible to map it out precisely, there is a small chance that one day it could return and crash into Earth. But don't panic: That chance is just 6% over a million years, and it would likely burn up as it entered the atmosphere.
Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues regularly model the motions of planets and exoplanets. "We have all the software ready, and when we saw the launch last week we thought, 'Let's see what happens.' So we ran the [Tesla's] orbit forward for several million years," he says. The Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX propelled the car out toward Mars, but the sun's gravity will bring it swinging in again some months from now in an elliptical orbit, so it will repeatedly cross the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus until it sustains a fatal accident. The Roadster's first close encounter with Earth will be in 2091 -- the first of many in the millennia to come.
Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues regularly model the motions of planets and exoplanets. "We have all the software ready, and when we saw the launch last week we thought, 'Let's see what happens.' So we ran the [Tesla's] orbit forward for several million years," he says. The Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX propelled the car out toward Mars, but the sun's gravity will bring it swinging in again some months from now in an elliptical orbit, so it will repeatedly cross the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus until it sustains a fatal accident. The Roadster's first close encounter with Earth will be in 2091 -- the first of many in the millennia to come.
chance (Score:2)
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I agree. I will take my chances and if in the next million years a car falls on me. Hey Free Car!
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You've got to love the title of the actual article [arxiv.org]: The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets. As if that were somehow a normal field of study, generalized so it can be applied to other cars as well.
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As someone on the internet recently said, "Thanks to Elon Musk there is now a non-zero chance of getting hit by a car in space."
Having been someone on the internet who has said this, and not remembering the source, I'll take credit for this insightfully stupid comment.
Insurance? (Score:2)
I hope he has collision
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I hope they can remotely update the car with improved collision DETECTION.
How awesome a publicity stunt would it be in 2091 if the car comes shooting straight at the earth, strikes through the atmosphere, and then grinds to a sudden and inexplicable halt 10 cm above the planet's surface?
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Funny)
Make that a '58 convertible corvette with some bitch'n heavy metal music playing and you might be on to something....
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It will probably get picked up (Score:3)
before 2091, as being space junk and a hazard to interplanetary spacecraft.
That's if Elon's dream of cheap spaceflight and interplanetary travels becomes reality.
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You know that interplanetary space is actually pretty big, right? Is there any reason you think that this elliptical orbit will ever be a major space lane?
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There are no "lanes"
Well...technically... [wikipedia.org] But even Hohmann orbits are likely to prefer a subset of possible transfer trajectories. Those with particularly low energy are often sought after.
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There are a lot of Hohmann transfer orbits. Between two particular planets, they all have nearly identical energy. Space is big and little things like roadsters will never hit each other. The planet earth is different because size + gravity gives it substantial cross section to collide with.
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Actually, asteroids *do* occasionally hit each other. It doesn't happen every day, but we don't really have a real good idea of how often. Often enough that we can observe the after effects, but we can only see that when two large chunks collide. For the smaller pieces...we can be sure it happens because there are a lot more of them, and even the larger pieces collide, but we can't really observe.
OTOH, frequency... it's probably rather rare, and most of the collisions are at low relative speeds. Fender
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before 2091, as being space junk and a hazard to interplanetary spacecraft.
That's if Elon's dream of cheap spaceflight and interplanetary travels becomes reality.
2091 is 73 years away. 73 years ago we were just wrapping up World War II and competing with the USSR in grabbing up some German scientists to seed the US space program.
Good thing the car will burn up on re-entry, though. A lot of commenters seem to think that "6% over a million years" means "6% AFTER a million years", when it really means "there's a 1 in 16 chance of this thing crossing paths with the Earth sometime in the next million years." All we know with reasonable certainty is that it won't happen i
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[...] is an interesting read, if you don't mind a PDF.
Whoa, you're kidding, right?
What in god's name other kind of format would anyone want for reading a serious scientific paper???
PDF is, seriously, the only way to go for something like this. If you do mind a PDF, there's something wrong with you in the head.
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What in god's name other kind of format would anyone want for reading a serious scientific paper???
Screen caps of a series of tweets posted to Facebook.
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I kinda like the idea of the car coming around every ~70 years to run over a bunch of orbiting satellites though. I also like the idea of it being a target to capture with prototypes for orbital mining companies.
As long as it doesn't have the Locnar (Score:2)
I am fine with it.
Why "reclaim the Tesla" prize? (Score:2)
I'm kind of surprised Musk didn't grandstand a bit and offer a large prize for reclaiming the Tesla intact, like $100 million or something?
It would obviously cost more than that with today's tech to actually pull it off, but it would be kind of amusing if in 20 years or something someone was actually able to cobble together a robotic mission to grab it and bring it back AND turn a profit on the whole thing.
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Two things I can think of: One, logistics of running a prize thing like that would be somewhat hard. Often for super rare chances (we'll give you 10% off for every inch of snow that falls on New Year's day) the sponsor will take out prize insurance, to mitigate having to pay out a pile of cash. Still, making sure that you have the longevity in the contest can be hard, especially given the boom and bust of so many companies on the cutting edge these days. Two, I bet if you did it anyway and brought it back t
But what are the chances for 40-50 years? (Score:2)
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Based on my, so far very successful, plan to live forever it is a near certainty that it will hit the earth within my life time. That Bastard is messing up my planet!
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I plan to live forever.
That was my plan too. Once.
I've learned though that Mother Nature has a different plan. And fighting it is a losing proposition.
But I hope things work out for you.
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zero
Awesome! (Score:2)
Maybe by then there'll be enough charge stations to use electric cars effectively.
So I guess we'll never know... (Score:2)
...whether there is, in fact, a dead hooker in the trunk.
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...whether there is, in fact, a dead hooker in the trunk.
He doesn't have to kill them when he owns the brothel
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No, but his nanna would give him an earful for having wasted a perfectly good pimpable employee.
The idea came from the same place - young Musky wished he could send his broccoli into the sun without her noticing.
I have to admit (Score:2)
I was not a huge fan of Star Trek: Voyager - but, in my mind, one of the funnier scenes occurred when they ran across an old pickup in space.
Meaningless number (Score:2)
To be more exact, you can run a zillion simulations to come up with a probability, but all of the hit/miss scenarios are meaningless if they're too far in the future.
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Well, that's exactly what they did: run a zillion simulations (with slightly different initial condidtions) to determine the probability of a collision in the future.
It would "likely" burn? (Score:2)
and it would likely burn up as it entered the atmosphere.
I'm no expert, but since asteroid usually need to be over 25 meter to reach ground (Look at Asteroid Fast Facts NASA on google), could be remove the "likely" out of the sentence?
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If it ever does, will it look like this? (Score:2)
If it lands in Britain (Score:2)
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Wait a minute. Jaguar and Aston Martin have made some terrific roadsters. I had a 1960s MGB roadster in the '80s that was great (though useless in Chicago winters). Triumph roadsters were some of the coolest cars ever made. If anything, the UK has had too many decent roadsters.
http://car-from-uk.com/carphot... [car-from-uk.com]
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Since the odds of it raining on any given day in the UK are about 50/50, you're probably better off taking the Morris sedan anyway.
Mariner 4 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Cross the orbit of Venus? (Score:4, Interesting)
TFA says the roadster will cross the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus. The last burn was in Earth orbit, so obviously it'll return there. The burn gave it an apohelion well beyond Mars orbit, so obviously it'll cross it (assuming it's in the ecliptic). Every diagram I've seen has the Roadster's orbit roughly tangent to Earth orbit, as would happen if the burn increased its orbital velocity.
Without major changes to its orbit, the Roadster will stay at Earth orbit or further from the Sun. If it were to make a course correction, it could establish an even more elliptical orbit and cross Venus orbit, but the delta-vee of a Tesla Roadster in a frictionless vacuum is very, very low.
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Oops - said TFA where I meant TFS. Sorry about that.
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The last burn was in Earth orbit, so obviously it'll return there.
In my experience its not obvious to most people, even on slashdot, and is evidenced whenever a discussion of planetary capture of moons comes up. The consequences of conservation of energy just doesnt factor into their thinking.
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I love the title of that article: "The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets"
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TFA [arxiv.org] goes into this in some detail. The car is expected to make a close encounter with Earth in 2091 that will sling it into a different orbit. Exactly *what* orbit is very difficult to predict: a difference in the velocity of the car today of 1 cm/s (well within measurement error) would make a massive difference to an encounter 73 years in the future.
Once it goes through that encounter, over the next few hundreds or hundreds of thousands of years, it will undergo a series of close encounters with various
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Ah, thank you very much.
Quick!!! (Score:2)
Call the lawyers!!!
Correction: a 0 percent chance (Score:3)
I am 100% confident that the car will never hit the Earth, because I fully expect that within the next couple hundred years it will be retrieved and put on display in a museum somewhere. Maybe the Luna City museum or the Ceres Museum; some Earth museum is also possible.
Right now, retrieving it is theoretically possible but such a huge and expensive undertaking that it's totally unreasonable. But if we build out our infrastructure, we will have spacecraft flitting between Earth, Mars, and the asteroids and sending a tow truck to grab the Roadster will be no big deal.
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Exactly. Odds are it will even be Elon (SpaceX) that picks it up, and my guess it will be within our/his lifetime, and that the car will be auctioned for millions.
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The question will be, then: will it still be drivable? It will probably need new tyres and I don't think the battery will like a multi-decade deep discharge, but apart from that? Will be interesting, for sure.
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> will it still be drivable?
I seriously doubt it. I'm sure just being in a vacuum will immediately kill the tyres and multiple other components. Micrometorites and radiation will probably damage the snot out of it too. No doubt Tesla would find a way to pretend it lasted just fine though or at least make it driveable again. I can't imagine them missing out on that giant marketing opportunity.
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I thought he might consider it to be some eternal monument to himself. Being out in space, it could be orbiting there for a very long time, maybe a billion years or so. Somewhat like the Moon landing sites which are historical monuments. Maybe future travellers will be able to visit them, but the whole area will be cordened off and they will have to look down from an observation deck, so everything can be preserved exactly as it was when Apollo astronauts left, footprints and all.
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Unless it returns and is worshiped by our primitive ancestors...
OOGA BOOGA! THE TESLA IS ANGRY! ALL HAIL THE TESLA!
Well played Musk, well played. Did anyone check the glove compartment for any commandments?
Et obfirmatis sera reserans Model S sit convenient. Etsi autem verum est clavem ad actio- nem, non opus est ea uti.
St'man seeks the Creator (Score:2)
We interrupt our regular programming to bring you this important breaking news. We have just learned that an unknown spacecraft is approaching Earth, origins and intentions unknown. Radar and satellite imaging reveal it to be massive in size. No direct contact has been possible so far. However, an emissary from the spaceship has teleported to the Missouri headquarters of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. This non-corporeal entity has occupied the body of an executive secretary who now speaks on behalf of the enig
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St’man
"Is this about the GPL?"
The car isn't the problem... (Score:2)
it's the asteroid that it knocks out of the asteroid belt into a collision course with Earth that's the problem.
Could make for a good scifi (Score:2)
The car comes crashing down in a place coincidentally named Roswell, and top scientists harvest this strange extraterrestrial technology for the wonders of ICs, microcontrollers & Li-ion batteries.
Obviously the government don't want to cause panic that some alien craft crashed from space, so they subtly release technology based on this 'Tesla' civilisatio
Radiation will tear it apart (Score:2)
long before it even gets anywhere remotely close to Mars, let alone coming back to Earth.
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This isn't orbiting the Earth. It's no more a problem than any chunk of rock orbiting our star.
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But why throw away a perfectly good car ? Or was his Telsa broken and beyond repair ?
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But why throw away a perfectly good car ? Or was his Telsa broken and beyond repair ?
Well, it was ten years old. He probably wanted an excuse to get a new one.
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Think of all the free advertising mileage he got/ is getting out of it.
It's probably a net savings, and the advertising is a lot less annoying.
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If he's shooting the car into space, he must not be very happy with it! If even the CEO is dumping it as far away as possible I'll think twice before buying one!
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He is pre-positioning it in the space garage, and will pick it up on the way to Mars. This way he will have something to drive.
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I wonder if it'll be useful as a practice target to identify for collision warning systems.
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"I wonder if it'll be useful as a practice target to identify for collision warning systems."
They should have added a solar panel on the hood, so that it can turn on the lights from time to time the next million years.
Re:Space junk (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Space junk (Score:5, Informative)
"Space junk" is only a problem in Earth orbit, where it has a significant chance of colliding with other important objects. The smaller, scattered debris left behind by launches or collisions is the real problem, as it's harder to track. When the Chinese intentionally blew up one of their own satellites in an anti-satellite missile test around a decade ago, it caused a real uproar, because they intentionally created thousands of pieces of debris that would be a problem for many decades to come.
This solar-orbiting Roadster is not any sort of real problem worth complaining about, unless you just want to grump about something.
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I'm not sure why China got so much flak for for testing ASAT, when the US did the same thing a few years prior.
I did a bit of looking into this.
Are you talking about the US Navy shootdown in 2008? Ostensibly, the US brought down their malfunctioning satellite in order to prevent it from becoming a hazard due to a large amount of toxic fuel on board. In that case, the satellite was already on its way down, and the destruction just made sure it would completely burn up in the atmosphere. According to reports at the time, all the debris was expected to re-enter the atmosphere within 40 days.
There was a much earlier
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Ostensibly, the US brought down their malfunctioning satellite in order to prevent it from becoming a hazard due to a large amount of toxic fuel on board.
Yes, ostensibly is the word. The satellite tank, a very thin shell (like all space fuel tanks) contained 500 kg of hydrazine, could not have survived re-entry intact -- such a thing has never happened before with the many deorbiting launchers and satellites over the years. You cannot get a hydrazine tank from orbit to Earth's surface unprotected with its contents still on board. Indeed even given that the pipe connections to the tank would be broken, the hydrazine would quickly have outgassed even from an i
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I'm not sure why China got so much flak
Also, I see what you did there...
The Reason (Score:2)
He's being celebrated because it's now Space junk, instead of Earth junk.
You try strapping several rockets all together and try to make it work out.
Just like Marvin, I expected an Earth-shatterimng Kaboom...
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He's being celebrated because it's now Space junk, instead of Earth junk.
You try strapping several rockets all together and try to make it work out.
Just like Marvin, I expected an Earth-shatterimng Kaboom...
No, it's only a 6% chance of hitting; that means there's a 94% chance of it landing vertically on a barge.
Re:Space junk (Score:5)
Well first of all it was cool as hell. Second of all this was test of the big ass rocket they used. Normally they would use dead weight like lead or sand, but this time Musk just decided to use his car.
An yes, there are other reasons. Mainly it was a publicity stunt for Space X. An it was a good one. It has people focused on space travel again. Anything that does that in a positive manner is a good thing to me.
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Also, I guarantee he will be the de facto record holder for "Owner of the Highest Mileage Tesla"!
The one thing that saddens me is the AAA policy requiring you to be with the car if you request service...
No No No, if you see Ganymede you've gone too far!
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...were in fact free Tesla/SpaceX advertising....
While you make a good point, my local news had a longish piece last night about Black Panther as if yet another superhero movie is something remarkable.
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Black Panther as if yet another superhero movie is something remarkable
People are making a big deal out of the Black Panther, some are saying it is the first black super hero. They are forgetting Blade with Wesley Snipes was back in 1998, 20 years ago.
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Blade was more antihero than super hero; along with Hancock, and do we count DeadShot in Suicide Squad?
Plus I recently watched, Luke Cage on Netflix, but that wasn't a feature film.
I agree perhaps Black Panther isn't the first, but there aren't really a lot. And there HAVE been a pile of marvel and DC super hero movies made in the last decade - ive lost count -- between Thor, Captain America, Spiderman, Superman and Batman and their sequels its already at least a dozen or more, and that's before even looki
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I'm trying to forget Suicide Squad but also totally forgot about Luke Cage.
I don't have any problem with fanfare, I just didn't want Blade swept under the rug. Blade was a nice breath of fresh air after sparkly vampires and romantic vampires.....
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Who's the cat that won't cop out
when there's danger all about?
(Shaft)
Right on
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It will certainly hold the record for the longest drift.
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Space is Big [Re:Space junk] (Score:5, Informative)
So far, we've discovered 15,000 rocks in orbits crossing close to Earth ("Near Earth Objects"), and the best estimate is that we've found about one quarter of the ones larger than 140 meters in diameter.
Wheelbase of a Tesla roadster is about four meters.
For every Tesla roadster in Earth-crossing orbit-- one--there are a million rocks that are at least that big.
There are a lot of asteroids. But, fortunately (quoting Douglas Adams), space is big. Really big.
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Why is Musk being celebrated for launching purpose-built space junk? I remember when space junk was considered a problem.
Why not? Space is rather large and there's plenty of it to accommodate both junk and non junk without them coming within light years of each other.
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Space junk in low and geosynchronous Earth orbit is a problem, this is in solar orbit along with about a billion rocks of comparable mass. And the low cost/mass lift provided by rockets like the Heavy is going to be critical for tug operations to keep crowded Earth orbits clear. The Heavy launch has great implications for space debris, but as something to enable us to mitigate it, not as something that contributes to it.
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Why is Musk being celebrated for launching purpose-built space junk? I remember when space junk was considered a problem.
Should we ever manage to create a space junk problem in heliocentric orbits, it would be an amazing achievement.
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Bullshit
There needed to be a test load. Instead of a lump of concrete he used an old car. No more dangerous, no CO2 emissions from making the concrete, much more interesting, and funny for those whose sense of humor is more evolved than bathroom jokes.
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Instead of a lump of concrete he used an old car. No more dangerous, no CO2 emissions from making the concrete...
Manufacturing a car is far more environmentally detrimental than making the same mass of concrete.
Otherwise I agree - his company, his money, his car. I found it clever.
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So was the concrete.
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The car was already manufactured.
Sure, but I bet he's going to replace it and the one is space won't end up on the secondary market.
Not that I think it was a bad idea, but this is a very deep rathole...
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For that matter, the second stage itself is more massive than the Roadster. He could have replaced the Roadster with a block of ice that would sublime in orbit, and the debris hazard would be essentially unchanged. It'd just have complicated the launch and left us a bit poorer culturally speaking.
The name of the next ASDS is the perfect response to those innumerate, ignorant, arrogant jackasses who think there was something wrong with Musk launching his old car as a test payload.
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Why do you go out and spend money on frivolous things like meals out and movies, risking the lives of other people (there's probably a 6% of you accidentally killing one once in a million years) when you could give every extra penny you have to charity instead?
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You seem to forget that the money spent on meals, movies, toys, etc is actually going to the pay of hundreds or even thousands of people who are involved in providing those things for sale. Better that your money keeps them employed than just spending it all on charity. Don't stop supporting charity too though :)
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"you could give every extra penny you have to charity"
Underage hookers in Haiti!!! Woo-hoo!!!
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Re: cute (Score:2)
They will be more remembered than the actual technological advancement marked by the launch, which is much bigger.