Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster — BrandWiki

Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster

Overview

Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster

names list	SpaceX Roadster‡R1R‡ Starman‡R1R‡
mission type	Test flight
operator	SpaceX
cospar id	2018-017A
satcat	43205
mission duration	Active: 1 Day In Orbit:
spacecraft type	2010 Tesla Roadster‡R2R‡ used as a mass simulator, attached to the upper stage of a Falcon Heavy rocket
manufacturer	Tesla and SpaceX
launch mass	~1300 kg; ~5900 kg including rocket upper stage‡R3R‡
launch rocket	Falcon Heavy FH-001
launch site	Kennedy LC-39A
launch contractor	SpaceX
deactivated	February 7, 2018
orbit reference	Heliocentric
orbit eccentricity	0.25571‡R4R‡
orbit periapsis	0.98613 au‡R4R‡
orbit apoapsis	1.6637 au‡R4R‡
orbit inclination	1.077°‡R4R‡
orbit period	1.525 year‡R4R‡
orbit epoch	1 May 2018
apsis	helion

Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car that served as the dummy payload for the February 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight and became an artificial satellite of the Sun. A mannequin in a spacesuit, dubbed "Starman", occupies the driver's seat. The car and rocket are products of Tesla and SpaceX, respectively, both companies headed by Elon Musk.[5] The 2010 Roadster is personally owned by and previously used by Musk for commuting to work.[2] It is the first production car launched into space.

The car, mounted on the rocket's second stage, was launched on an escape trajectory and entered an elliptical heliocentric orbit crossing the orbit of Mars.[6] The orbit reaches a maximum distance from the Sun at

Trajectory

Animation of SpaceX Roadster trajectory.gif is ~250 million kilometres (1.66 au).|alt=Diagram of the inner solar system with the circular orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars going around the Sun. The orbit of the Tesla Roadster is shown in red, also encircling the Sun, but in an ellipse shape that touches Earth orbit on one side of the Sun, and extends outwards beyond Mars orbit on the other side of the Sun.]]

The US Office of Commercial Space Transportation issued the test flight's launch license on February 2, 2018.[25] The rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center[25] at 15:45 EST (20:45 UTC) on February 6.[26] The upper stage supporting the car was initially placed in an Earth parking orbit.[6] It spent six hours coasting through the Van Allen radiation belts, thereby demonstrating a new capability requested by the U.S. Air Force for direct insertion of heavy intelligence satellites into geostationary orbit. Then, the upper stage performed a second boost to reach the desired escape trajectory.[27][28][29]

The launch was live streamed, and video feeds from space showed the Roadster at various angles, with Earth in the background, thanks to cameras placed inside and outside the car, on booms attached to the vehicle's custom adaptor atop the upper stage.[30][31] Musk had estimated the car's battery would last over 12 hours, but the live stream ran for just over four hours, thus ending before the final boost out of Earth orbit.[32][33][34] The images were released by SpaceX into the public domain on their Flickr account.[35][36]

Following the launch, the rocket stage carrying the car was given the Satellite Catalog Number 43205, named "TESLA ROADSTER/FALCON 9H", along with the COSPAR designation 2018-017A.[37] The JPL Horizons system publishes solutions for the trajectory as target body "-143205".[1][4]

The Roadster is in a heliocentric orbit that crosses the orbit of Mars and reaches a distance of 1.66 au from the Sun.[6] With an inclination of roughly 1 degree to the ecliptic plane, compared to Mars' 1.85° inclination, this trajectory by design cannot intercept Mars, so the car will neither fly by Mars nor enter an orbit around Mars.[38] This was the second object launched by SpaceX to leave Earth orbit, after the DSCOVR mission to the Earth–Sun Lagrangian point. Nine months after launch, the Tesla had travelled beyond the orbit of Mars,[39] reaching aphelion at 12:48 UTC on November 9, 2018, at a distance of 248,892,559 km from the Sun.[4] The maximum speed of the car relative to the Sun will be approximately 121,000 km/h at perihelion.[40]

Even if the rocket had targeted an actual Mars transfer orbit, the car could not have been placed into orbit around Mars, because the upper stage that carries it is not equipped with the necessary propellant, maneuvering, and communications capabilities. This flight simply demonstrated that Falcon Heavy is capable of launching significant payloads towards Mars in potential future missions.[38]

Reactions

The choice of the Roadster as a dummy payload was variously interpreted as marketing for Tesla, or a work of art, with some worrying about the risk to contamination of otherwise sterile solar system bodies. Some also commented on how the Roadster was not a space debris risk.

Marketing

Musk was lauded as a savvy marketer and brand manager by controlling both the timing and the content of his corporate public relations.[53][54][55] After the launch, Scientific American said using a car was not entirely pointless, in the sense that something of that size and weight was necessary for a meaningful test.[56]

Advertising Age agreed with Business Insider that the Roadster space launch was the "greatest ever car commercial without a dime spent on advertising", demonstrating that Musk is "miles ahead of the rest" in reaching young consumers, where "mere mortals scrabble about spending millions to fight each other over seconds of air time", Musk "just executes his vision."[53][54] Alex Hern, technology reporter for The Guardian, said the choice to launch a car was a "hybrid of genuine breakthrough and nerd-baiting publicity stunt" without "any real point beyond generating good press pics", which should not detract from the much more important technological milestone represented by the launch of the rocket itself.[57]

Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy director, initially said the choice of payload for the Falcon Heavy maiden flight is a gimmick and a loss of opportunity to further advance science—but later clarified that "I was told by a SpaceX VP (vice president) at the launch that they offered free launches to NASA, Air Force etc. but got no takers."[58]

Musk responded to the critics by stating he wanted to inspire the public about the "possibility of something new happening in space," as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.[59]

Work of art

The Verge likened the Roadster to a "ready-made" work of art, such as Marcel Duchamp's 1917 piece Fountain, created by placing an everyday object in an unusual position, context and orientation.[60]

Alice Gorman, a lecturer in archaeology and space studies at Flinders University in Australia, said that the Roadster's primary purpose is symbolic communication, that "the red sports car symbolises masculinity – power, wealth and speed[61] – but also how fragile masculinity is". Drawing on anthropological theories of symbols, she argues that "the car is also an armour against dying, a talisman that quells a profound fear of mortality". Gorman wrote that "the spacesuit is also about death. ... The Starman was never alive, but now he's haunting space".[62]

Space debris non-risk

Orbital debris expert Darren McKnight stated that the car poses no risk because it is far from Earth orbit. He added: "The enthusiasm and interest that [Musk] generates more than offsets the infinitesimally small 'littering' of the cosmos."[63] Tommy Sanford, director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said that the car and its rocket stage are no more "space junk" than the mundane material usually launched on other test flights. Mass simulators are often deliberately placed in a graveyard orbit or sent on a deep space trajectory, where they are not a hazard.[64]

Bacteriological contamination

The Planetary Society was concerned that launching a non-sterile object to interplanetary space may risk biological contamination of a foreign world.[65] Scientists at Purdue University noted that the vehicle will be sterilized by solar radiation over time and the vehicle is most likely to hit the Earth in the future, though some bacteria might survive on some components of the vehicle which could contaminate Mars in the distant future if it were to hit Mars instead.[66]