JCC The Official SpaceX Launch/Disaster Thread

This is live views.

 

It's now on its earth departure trajectory and has already pulled away well beyond LEO.



But they have a good signal from it. The car is slowly rotating around its Y axis, so the earth is visible from multiple angles every minute or so. As it has now gotten a few thousand miles away, the earth is visible outside the car as a full planet (rather than taking up almost half the sky and still having a horizon as in LEO).







I really hope the signal holds all the way until the earth becomes a pale blue dot in the background.

 

Those are great images.

 

And the memification begins:



STAY ON TARGET!

 

You know you are a nerd when the wallpaper on your tablet is an actual sports car in actually outer space.

 

Just sitting here looking at the live feed and I realized that it is the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life.

 

The absurdity of spending $90 million to send a sports car to Mars is hilarious.

 

There is a live press conference starting. Not sure of the center core landed safely yet.

 

The two boosters landed in spectacular fashion, but the center core ran out of something to do with propellant and splashed down at around 300 mph.

 

That was a thing of beauty I love the Don't Panic reference to Hitchhikers

 

Musk just said their entire development cost was over half a billion.

 

Ok, so they spent $500 million to send a sports car to Mars. That’s still hilarious. Also, millions of years in the future, there will hopefully be really confused aliens, which is also hilarious.

 

Elon Musk just shot a sportscar with a spaceman sitting in the driver's seat to Jesus. And I cannot wrap around my head of the landing of the boosters. Totally blows me away.

 

You know JJA is watching this and nerding out over the lens flares.

 

Here is the press conference. At the 22 mark he is asked and responds about the BFR. Single Stage To Orbit.



Waaaaaaaay down the road I assume someone will try to recover the car. But apparently not much will be left of it.

 

Half a billion, that's chump change. The development of the Boeing 747 cost 3.7 billion, and that was in 1970 dollars. The 787 Dreamliner dev cost was 13.4 billion. The Airbus a380 development cost was 14.4 billion.

 

Well, that's true but SpaceX does not have the disposable income that a supplier like Boeing has. Regardless, The Falcon flies for 60 million, the Falcon Heavy can do 3 times the work but for 90 million.

 

New footage. Amazing.

 

Apparently, according to my parents, there is a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the glove box. You know you are a nerd when.....

 

Yeah, I heard that on the radio yesterday. I wonder if he packed a towel.

 

I wonder, after all a truly hoopy frood trying to see the wonders of the galaxy on a single Altairian dollar a day will have a towel. I also wonder, seeing as this is the world’s most expensive Douglas Adams joke masquarading as a rocket launch, if the car’s license plate is 42.

 

Yes, there is a towel and Asimov's Foundation series in that car.

 

So,the main booster crashed into the ocean at 300 mph, having overspent its fuel, luckily missing its target, otherwise it would have destroyed its landing platform completely, while the roadster overshot its planned orbit, so some kind of pretty serious error(s) - shoddy calculations, shoddy navigation. If that had been a real astronaut riding in a spacecraft, she would be pretty pissed off right now, doomed to miss her target and float in space for a near eternity. Not exactly precision work there.