Spacex booster recovery w/o dry landing

I understand the fuel economy was atrocious though.

 

Any status on drone ship landing?

 

Well, thank God, pur falcon heavy rocket successfully blabsted off.

Congrats to my "unofficial" mentor, Elon Musk.

 

Go Starman Go!!!

 

everybody was watching from the pool, here in orlando. i didn't realize you could see it this far away.

 

It depends on when you figure it. At the moment the pulse phase ends, it will be bad. But after some glide time, it should be vastly better.

 

Splashed.

The sight of the twin side boosters landing on the 2 pads, in tandem, and just a half second apart, was astounding.

 

Intended barge-landing unit hit water at 300 mph, Perhaps nothing will be recovered from that.

 

Perhaps, but I do believe those things can float.

In another forum entirely, this same discussion is ongoing. When one of the other moderators learned of the delayed and reported demise of the central booster, he typed "I never really liked that one."

 

The car was presumably registered in California. There is an "Affidavit of non-use" that allows owner to stop paying insurance and registration. As far as I can get through that, there is no place to choose among (my categories):

Transferred to another state
Lost
Stolen
Totaled
Other (please specify)

Last would apply, and include historically unique wording. So let us see that, Mr. Musk. "Launched into elliptical solar orbit" would tersely cover facts. But one hopes for a bit more exposition.

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float@30. Sealed metal tubes can float for sure. But this prompt deceleration could open the can. And down she goes.

 

Mars avg distance to Sun 136 million miles. The red car furthest distance from Sun 243 million miles is a bit of an overshoot.

What is minimum distance from Sun in this orbit? might get hot in there.

 

Perihelion at 0.98 AU, apohelion at 2.61 AU, according to Musk's tweet with an orbital map. But since you are across the Great Firewall:

 

Actually five engines, with four combustion chambers each.

No part of the Soyuz rocket is reusable. Some parts of the Soyuz capsule can be reused like the seats and some instruments, but not the capsule itself. Meanwhile SpaceX recently reused a Dragon capsule for the first time.

The twelve smaller nozzles are for steering. They are actually just additional combustion chambers for the same engines as the larger combustion chambers, and are ignited at liftoff along with the twenty large combustion chambers. The big difference is that the smaller ones gimbal (i.e. swivel) for steering. All thirty-two combustion chambers are ignited a few seconds before liftoff. If the computer detects that one of the combustion chambers didn't ignite, the launch is automatically aborted. That is extremely rare but it did happen on a Soyuz launch in 2016 (which I happened to be watching live online). The problem turned out to be a failed ignitor. They replaced all the ignitors and launched 24 hours later.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 is designed so that one or I think maybe even two (non-adjacent) engines can fail during flight and the remaining engines merely throttle up to make up the shortfall in thrust. And an exploding engine is contained so that the other engines aren't damaged. That actually happened on an early Falcon 9 flight. As for Falcon Heavy, I'm not sure how many of the 27 engines can go out and still make up for it.

 

Spaceweather.com says something different, though it doesn't really change the question of how close it will get to the sun. Only the far end is way off.

"It's official. Elon Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster is a spacecraft. NASA is now listing the electric car in its database of celestial objects, and publishing an ephemeris for tracking it on JPL's Horizons web site.
...
According to NASA, the Roadster is following an elliptical orbit around the sun ranging in distance from 0.99 AU to ~1.7 AU."

Looking at a JPL table, it appears that the Perihelion (periapsis) discrepancy may be a small rounding vs truncation matter. But the apohelion discrepancy is quite large.

 

That is the revised estimate. Musk's post-launch tweet about it going to the asteroid belt was apparently based on preliminary data which turned out not to be correct. As SpaceX originally predicted it will go just past Mars orbit (but nowhere near Mars).

18.8 months