SpaceX’s Tesla passes Mars’ orbit
Capitalism in space: The Tesla roadster that was put into solar orbit by the first Falcon Heavy launch in February has now successfully flown beyond Mars’ orbit.
The significance of this achievement is that this payload was put into solar orbit by a private company, using its own funds. The government had nothing to do with it.
For the entire history of the space age such a thing was considered absurd and impossible. You needed government to fund and build these big space projects. With this launch SpaceX and Elon Musk once again demonstrated how that accepted wisdom was bunk.
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Capitalism in space: The Tesla roadster that was put into solar orbit by the first Falcon Heavy launch in February has now successfully flown beyond Mars’ orbit.
The significance of this achievement is that this payload was put into solar orbit by a private company, using its own funds. The government had nothing to do with it.
For the entire history of the space age such a thing was considered absurd and impossible. You needed government to fund and build these big space projects. With this launch SpaceX and Elon Musk once again demonstrated how that accepted wisdom was bunk.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
So a wheel of cheese (First Dragon flight), a Tesla Roadster (first Falcon Heavy flight). Those are pretty silly payloads.
What will they up the ante with the first BFR mission? (How about the remaing Falcon 1? Launch that as internal payload? That would be pretty recursive).
geoffc,
it may seem silly but the choices are very memorable — brilliantly leveraged marketing on the part of SpaceX (Musk).
GEOFFC:
(perhaps) First manned flight of BFR: 10 artists around the Moon? Is that epic enough?
I believe Mars is singular. Shouldn’t that be “Mars’s orbit”?
Andi: In the old days, indicating possession by an object that ended in “s” was done by only adding an apostrophe. Thus, Mars would become Mars’. The reason was not singular or plural but the quality of sound. Grammarians didn’t like the sound of the multiple s’s.
In recent years this has broken down, so that it is often written as Mars’s. I have done it both ways, depending on my mood.
@Fred K: You sir, make an excellent point. I had forgotten that! Though somehow I doubt the very first manned mission with be the Moon mission. I am sure they will fly people before that in testing, nonetheless that is a very good point.
Pretty dang memorable and epic example!
@Jburn: Dang straight! And he got BOTH his main companies tons of publicity. In the advertising world, wonder how ‘cost effective’ if you split the cost across Tesla and SpaceX, the cost of the F-H mission would have really cost?
Ok, so SuperBowl ad is $5 mill, and a F-H is in theory $80 mil (If they had landed the core stage for reuse, which is moot, since these were Block 3/4 cores (Side boosters on second flight, core on first) anyway and won’t fly again).
So maybe not a great deal, but they had to fly it anyway, with something. It was a truly inspired idea. I loved when he said it, people poo-pooed it then, of course he just did it.
Inspiring!
Robert: Interesting! When I was in school, they drilled it into us that singular nouns always got the apostrophe and s, even if they already ended in s, while plural nouns ending in s due to the pluralization only got the apostrophe. Guess things change! Thanks for pointing that out.
Andi: for what it is worth I was taught just the other way. To me “…s’s” looks just plain weird.