After what was one of the most exciting and iconic rocket launches since the Saturn V,
SpaceX successfully launched Falcon Heavy a few days ago.
I won’t lie, I wished SpaceX good luck, but complicated rockets of this nature present
problems that prevent complete ground testing, and I was worried.
You just have to eventually take the plunge and launch them and see what happens, and
as a result of that often don’t work the first time.
As it turns out, everything worked, other than the central core stage crashing instead
of landing.
Of course the payload was the infamous Tesla Roadster instead of the usual concrete blocks
typically used for testing weights.
So, there is now a production car in solar orbit.
But what happens to the car over time?
There’s been a lot of misconceptions regarding just what the car would do once in space.
It was never designed, for example to go into Mars orbit.
You need very specific, planned and specialized equipment to do that and this rocket had none
of that.
But it does demonstrate that Falcon Heavy can deliver payloads to Mars, among many orbital
launch capabilities.
Instead of Mars, the car is now in a heliocentric orbit that takes it almost out to the asteroid
belt due to a little extra power left in the upper stage of the rocket after a stint of
several hours in the environment of the Van Allen belts.
But now what?
Will this car spend a billion years in space?
The answer is probably no, and even if it does only part of it will make it.
Generally speaking, parts of the space Tesla are not long for this solar system.
It’s just a car, designed to operate on Earth.
In space, it’s exposed to solar radiation unbridled by lack of an atmosphere, cosmic
rays, and also micrometeoroids.
As a result, the organic compounds in the car won’t last long at all.
The carbon compounds, such as plastics, vinyl, leather etc. probably won’t make it much
more than a year before they degrade and disintegrate, though the carbon fiber probably will last
a bit longer.
Same story with the paint and the tires, that stuff has trouble dealing the sun on a long
term basis here on earth, much less in space exposed to the raw fury of our star.
But the metals in the car, the frame, body, etc. will last for very long periods of time.
But even then, they will get scoured by micrometeoroids until eventually perhaps all that will be
left will be the aluminum frame.
But this stage will take millions upon millions of years, and there’s a problem there.
In a paper by Hanno Rein and colleagues, link in the description below, they detail models
that show that now that the roadster is in space, it’s in such an orbit that it will
make passes of Earth and Mars and experience a kind of drift in its orbit that could eventually
bring it close to Venus.
If so, it may well hit Venus, or Earth, and end its sojourn in space in just a few tens
of millions of years.
Be that as it may, I have to wonder about the contents of the car.
Personally, I found this to be the most fun aspect of the launch.
SpaceX included a number of “easter eggs”, if you will.
Included are a copy of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reportedly stowed in the
glove box along poetically with a towel, one of the most useful things in the universe
according to Douglas Adams.
But there’s more.
On the dashboard, and visible in the footage, is a Hot Wheels copy of the Tesla Roadster
complete with a tiny version of Starman, and then there is Starman himself, a mannequin
sporting SpaceX’s space suit they’ve been developing.
Also included are two David Bowie songs looping on the stereo, and even one of the circuitboards
was modified to say “Made on Earth by Humans”.
Indeed it was.
One thing that especially piqued my interest however was a digital disk containing Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, more on that in a minute.
But as for Douglas Adams, it’s hard to say how long an organic-based paper book and the
towel will last in the radiation of space protected by a glove box, but the metal from
the model car will probably last a long time.
I have no idea how long Starman’s suit will last since it was designed for the environment
of space, but the mannequin inside will likely degrade fast.
But the longest lasting item might be the digital arch library with the Asimov book
so long as it doesn’t burn up in the Venusian atmosphere.
The whole idea with these Arch libraries, link to their site below, is to disseminate
human knowledge and culture on long term storage devices throughout the solar system where
they should last millions, or more years.
This is useful in two ways, if we ever lose civilization and then rise again, we’ll
be able to retrieve lost knowledge, but also if an alien civilization happens to pass through
and find the storage devices long after we’re gone, they will have found a treasure trove
of information about us in addition to what’s left of the Roadster and our other probes
in the solar system.
Other interesting facts about this launch include that the Roadster is now one of two
formerly manned vehicles in space itself, not sitting on the moon.
The other being Apollo 10’s lunar module.
In the Roadster’s case, it was formerly manned by Elon Musk while he sat in traffic
in Los Angeles dreaming of boring traffic tunnels under that city.
You could also say it’s the fastest car ever built by humans, but that’s sort of
cheating since it’s mounted on the upper stage of what was an enormous rocket.
Fun aside, ultimately, falcon heavy demonstrates a launch system that can deliver large payloads,
such as those the weight of a car, into earth orbit for paying customers.
It also takes us one step closer to a manned mission to Mars, and possibly colonization
if Elon Musk’s plans continue to pan out.
I’ve learned over the years, after watching much naysaying and skepticism, that SpaceX
has a tendency to deliver.
I’ve seen it all, from the start of the company when people said they’d never be
able to compete with Lockheed and Boeing, to skepticism that rockets could ever be landed
and reused, odd given that the Space Shuttle did that for years, and many such criticisms.
They’ve sailed neatly past most of them.
So next comes the infamous BFR, which when it launches it will be akin to watching a
Saturn V launch, something we haven’t seen in decades.
Likewise I see strong criticism, some from noted scientists and popularizers, that a
Martian colony is neither feasible nor desirable.
No one would want to live on Mars, it’s too harsh, and so on … and that may be the
case.
Mars will kill you if you aren’t careful.
But California will also kill you, and long ago many said we shouldn’t build a railroad
to it.
Then someone found gold.
Also, Antarctica will kill you.
When humans first started exploring it, it wasn’t, and still isn’t a very useful
place on its face, yet studying it is one of the hotbeds of science and there is a permanent
human presence there, even during the winter when outposts are completely isolated and
you can’t just go outside.
So I reserve judgment about Mars and I’m simply excited to watch it play out.
I think there are people both suited for, and ready and willing to go live on Mars and
brave the challenges.
It all depends on the individual, and I even think some of them would have to be dragged
kicking and screaming back to earth should it ever come to that.
And, as I said, it hasn’t been a good idea to count Elon Musk out on anything.
And speaking of, there is now a Tesla in space.
So what does that really mean?
Was it just a publicity stunt, or does the Space Tesla actually accomplish something
other than dead weight atop a rocket.
Well, here’s my take.
If you take that footage with all the cheering folks at SpaceX, the music, the powerful images
of the rocket launch and of course the starman footage and and play it in every class room
on planet earth I’m confident you’ll get a lot further with science popularization
than you will with dry textbooks and quizzes.
Be bold, Elon, and keep going.
Next stop, for better or worse, is Mars.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently worried about the
aliens that might find the roadster millions of years from now.
What if they don’t like the design or David Bowie’s music is sort of meh for them.
As such, the next car we launch should be a ‘85 Chrysler Lebaron with some Robert
Goulet playing on the tape deck.
Always hedge your bets.
And speaking of music, I’m also plugging Snakes have Legs!
They wrote an awesome, truly epic metal song about me, link below along with a link to
the Snakes Have Legs Patreon page and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.