Quote:
Originally Posted by benman94
I've got to be honest, I fail to see the point in such an exercise. Perhaps because I found physical cosmology dreadfully boring in undergrad, but I've never gotten that excited over anything Spacex has done.
What exactly is Mr. Musk trying to prove here?
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Basically they needed a simulated load to put in their new heavy lift rocket for testing. This new rocket allows for larger satellites, station components or trans-planetary spacecraft to be pulled out of the gravity well. Honestly if this was NASA it likely would of been a fancy lump of concrete....which is kinda boring even though it does the job.
Elon knew there was a 50/50 that this rocket on its first launch was either going to blow up on the pad or it was going to make it to space, so if it was going to make it, why not stuff something stupid inside as the test load? Why not his car?
Also SpaceX is a private company, unlike NASA which just needs to keep congress happy. Being able to not only launch the largest rocket since the Saturn V (and cost 1/10 that of the competitors rocket) AND doing so with the boss's car inside is an amazing PR stunt which also shows confidence to the investors which Elon needs for the BFR project.
To scale just how publicized this was, the youtube stream at one point had nearly two million active watchers and EVERY radio and TV station around here after the launch was talking about it.
02-06-2018, 09:59 PM
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