SpaceX just made history.

[Strychnine]

My guess is this was a planned automatic event. Obviously the engineers asked the question "What do we do if comes in too fast?" and planned scenarios and software around it.

For sure, this would have been a contingency plan built into the guidance software. In that moment there's no way they would put the "splash vs barge" decision on the shoulders of just one person, with the world watching, and only seconds to decide

if (SPEED < ____ ) {cout << land on barge}
else {cout << Kill as many fish as possible}

[Sgt Beavis]

That guy sure knows how to waste other people’s money!!! Wouldn’t put one dime in his rockets and shit nobody buys

Well, if you're nobody, then yes nobody buys it.

They've already got 5 Falcon Heavy missions on the manifest.

As far as 'other peoples money', I guess that is a reference to the government funding SpaceX has gotten. NASA gave them $396million to develop both the Falcon9 and the Dragon capsule. Compare that to the EELV rockets (AtlasV and DeltaIV) that were developed under contracts costing $3.9Billion. ULA (a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed/Martin) is charging between $109million to $153million per launch (depending on configuration). There are also options that push that to $180million.. These are the standard rockets and not the heavy version of the DeltaIV which only has about half the lift capacity of the F9H. The EELV rockets are also rehashes of older designs and used an existing Russian rocket engine. The Falcon 9 was a clean sheet design by comparison. The standard Falcon9 is $60million per flight and the F9H is $90million per flight. Those are before discounts are applied for reused boosters.

Also, the F9 Heavy was produced without any taxpayer money. Not a dime.

So yes, it's other peoples money but it's also a bargain. I haven't even gotten into the SLS rocket that has already cost $7BILLION and may never fly. If it does fly, it will likely cost $500-$1billon per launch.

One more thing, the Trump administration was eyeballing the F9Heavy launch. Rumors are that Pence wants to kill the SLS rocket and use the F9H to return us to the moon.

[S_K]

My guess is this was a planned automatic event. Obviously the engineers asked the question "What do we do if comes in too fast?" and planned scenarios and software around it.

[Strychnine]

Unconfirmed scuttlebutt is that the main booster was diverted off so it did not hit the drone ship. It was coming in too fast and would have punched a hole thru the ship. A decision was made to sacrifice the the booster instead of losing both the booster and the ship.

Elon Musk did say in his press conference.

The center core was only able to relight one of the three engines necessary to land, and so it hit the water at 300 miles per hour about 300 feet from the drone ship. As a result, two engines on the drone ship were taken out when it crashed, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press call after the rocket launch. “[It] was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel,” he said.

Makes sense. They've obviously nailed the guidance for landing, so a last-minute miss to save the barge sounds plausible.

The core section was an older design anyway (block 3?) so there's no real point in saving it for future use.

[S_K]

Unconfirmed scuttlebutt is that the middle booster was diverted off so it did not hit the drone ship. It was coming in too fast and would have punched a hole thru the ship. A decision was made to sacrifice the the booster instead of losing both the booster and the ship.

Elon Musk did say in his press conference.

The center core was only able to relight one of the three engines necessary to land, and so it hit the water at 300 miles per hour about 300 feet from the drone ship. As a result, two engines on the drone ship were taken out when it crashed, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press call after the rocket launch. “[It] was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel,” he said.

[mschmoyer]

What a show! Can't find anything as amazing as that these days. Worth letting a few people get extremely rich to see actual human achievement in something bigger than us.

Updated orbit puts it a little closer to what they shot for:
"But astronomers online noticed some discrepancies with the numbers Musk tweeted, and SpaceX ultimately sent a revised orbit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Wednesday (You can find it by selecting “target body” -143205.) The new orbit shows that the car will indeed travel farther out than the orbit of Mars, but not far enough to make it to the asteroid belt. The belt begins about 329 million miles from the Sun, and the Tesla will reach a distance about 160 million miles away from the Solar System’s star."

[jw33]

BFR maiden. You’re welcome...

[jw33]

Great video and sound of the landing.

[Chas_svo]

They didn't overshoot Mars. They overshot the orbital path that would take them to Mars (worth noting, they never planned to insert into Mars orbit. It was always going to be a flyby and a heliocentric orbit). If the final burn would have gone exactly to plan and it were still headed to Mars, it's like a 7 month journey.

The green line (orbit projection) likely stops where it does in that pic b/c they don't have precise enough data to continue calculations. The car wasn't rigged up like a satellite, it really was just thrown up there to get some cool pictures. They didn't even try to gather data from the space suit or put a solar panel on it to power the camera longer.




Here's some interesting analysis someone did:

I remember how hard it was to calculate perturbed orbits!!!!

[Craizie]

Go back into your hole.

[Captain Crawfish]

That guy sure knows how to waste other people’s money!!! Wouldn’t put one dime in his rockets and shit nobody buys

[Big A]

Those rocket landings are a trip, reminds me (in a much more positive light) of what it was like watching the news on 9/11. Looked fake, but was/is very real.

[zachary]

Yea after i posted that i realized it was the potential orbit path not actual path to date.

I was very surprised there was no data gathering systems on the car or the suit. I thought even nasa or air force would want to put some things on there. I guess he really did not expect it to survive.

[Strychnine]

I read where they slightly over shot mars and it is headed to astroid belt?

I thought it would take a looong time to get there? Diagram shows already there?

They didn't overshoot Mars. They overshot the orbital path that would take them to Mars (worth noting, they never planned to insert into Mars orbit. It was always going to be a flyby and a heliocentric orbit). If the final burn would have gone exactly to plan and it were still headed to Mars, it's like a 7 month journey.

The green line (orbit projection) likely stops where it does in that pic b/c they don't have precise enough data to continue calculations. The car wasn't rigged up like a satellite, it really was just thrown up there to get some cool pictures. They didn't even try to gather data from the space suit or put a solar panel on it to power the camera longer.




Here's some interesting analysis someone did:

Based on the numbers in Elon's picture:

Apohelion: 2.61 AU (Ra)
Perihelion: 0.98 AU (Rp)
a: semi-major axis
e: eccentricity
Ra=a(1+e) ; Ra/(1+e) = a
Rp=a(1-e) ; Rp/(1-e) = a
Ra(1+e) = Rp(1-e) ; solve for e, e = 0.454039
Solve for a, a = 1.785 1.795 AU
Orbital period T = 2pi * sqrt(a3 / u_sun) = 871.1 878.4 days.

u: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standa...onal_parameter

One sidereal year is ~365.25 days. Assuming the perihelion ends up coming back to roughly the same spot where the earth is in 5 roadster orbits, it might come back within a few million miles in 12 earth years if its orbit doesn't get perturbed too greatly (for example, it might get close enough to Jupiter at some point that you really have to take it into account to get accurate positions a few years out), but we need to know the inclination and some other parameters to get a complete ephemeris to run a simulation (probably including Jupiter) to see where it'll actually end up. https://i.imgur.com/hSYs1Jg.png

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...%5E2))+to+days

[svauto-erotic855]

I wonder how long it will take for all of the plastic in the car to turn into dust.