Posted on 02/07/2018 4:54:26 PM PST by BenLurkin
In a late-night update, Musk announced that the Falcon Heavy stage did survive its daring slog through the Van Allen belts.
"Third burn successful," Musk wrote on Twitter. "Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt."
Starman and the Roadster are now flying in a long, elliptical orbit around the sun. At its farthest point, that orbit extends nearly 243 million miles (390 million kilometers). That's 2.61 times the average distance between Earth and the sun, which is, on average, about 93 million miles (150 million km).
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Miller? Is that you?
I was actually laughing at the clowns on TV this morning reporting this as if it were real. Some people just did not pay attention in school.
Watching the live feed - how cool would it be to see a craft pull up and a crew of pro car thieves yank Starman out, unbolt it from Falcon Heavy and take off with it!?
.
What a friggin waste!
.
They simply placed it in a trajectory to an orbit.
The MSM thinks is on Mars despite the drawings of the plan.
"Find one in every car."
Cost of car: tens of thousands
Cost of rockets: hundreds of millions
Creating your own category in Trivial Pursuit: priceless
If you had the chance to go into space, and change the world, would you go?
I would in a NY second.
Well if it did come crashing down to Earth, wouldn’t it burn up on re-entry? The space shuttle columbia is many times bigger than the roadster and it didn’t take out any buildings.
It’s like a lattice of coincidence...
Let those with two degrees from U Penn (one in physics the other in economics from Wharton) cast the first stone.
I remember the buttoned down, white collared, crew cut guys in the control rooms during Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Spacelab, et al. Watching all those excited young engineers whooping and hollering in their exuberance...wow. That wasn't the Gene Krantz way to behave.
"OK, boys (and girls), back to work!"
LOL!
Thanks for a good laugh!
I did not understand Musk’s tweet last night, as it takes 2 YEARS to get to Mars, and somehow his rocket is now between Mars and Jupiter.
The Apollo missions took three days because it was required for safety to be on a free-return trajectory. Too much velocity and it would just blow past the Moon. New Horizons, for example, took nine hours to cross the Moon’s orbit after it was launched. Needed that extra velocity to encounter Jupiter for a gravity assist and then on to Pluto.
Exactly. Musk spoke in shorthand, but that’s what he was saying. He basically said the Specific Impulse exceeded predictions.
When I was A kid I demonstrated a model of Ion Propulsion.
Its to weak to get out of our atmosphere, but once in space...
I think Voyager is still out there 30 years later, flying to the edge of the galaxy.
What Musk has done is nothing short of AMAZING
“someone says shrimp or plate or plate of shrimp”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.