One question I had about the Tesla launch that wasn't clear is whether the car was thoroughly sanitized prior to sending it up. My understanding is that any object that has the potential to reach another planet has to be thoroughly sterilized to avoid inadvertently introducing Earth organisms to another planet. The chances are technically low but it is theoretically possible and its why NASA has a dedicated page on "planetary protection": https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/technology/insituexplorati...
My hope is that the SpaceX people did the same for this Tesla. Otherwise it would be rather reckless especially since now it is clear there wasn't a specific controlled orbit path, just a burn to launch it as far as possible, and now its possible it could end up impacting something and potentially contaminating it with Earth organisms.
NASA doesn’t sterilizes most probes either even planatery ones unless they are destined to land in a protected environment.
Cassini was deorbited on Saturn specifically to minimize the chances of it crashing into one of its moons and contaminating it.
If the car would land on Mars it would be a whole other story but as long as the biggest risk is that it would burn in its atmosphere if it even stood a chance of being captured it doesn’t need any extraordinary sanitation other than the usual clean room treatment.
Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, had this to say on sterilization of Mars probes:
WEIR: I am not a fan. And I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past.
My main concern is this. OK, so just run through a little flowchart in your mind. Start off by saying, “Is there anything that’s on Earth, any organism on Earth, that can survive an eight-month journey through the vacuum of space and the radiation of space, and all the other rigors of being just out in space, that can survive the trip from Earth to Mars?” OK, maybe some tardigrades could; it’s possible; maybe some bacteria inside of something could. OK.
But if your answer to that is no, then there’s no need for planetary protection.
If your answer is yes, then the next question is, “Is there any life native to Earth that could find anything to eat on Mars?” That there’s any, anything . . . “Would it be able to survive and reproduce on Mars?” I don’t think it would. So if the answer to that is no, then there’s no need for planetary protection.
If it’s yes, then ask yourself this: “Would that life that you accidentally introduced to Mars — ”
Oh, sorry. Right at the top of this flowchart, ask, “Do you think there’s life on Mars?” If the answer is no, there’s no need for planetary protection. If the answer is yes, then move into these other steps.
Now, so since we’re assuming there’s life on Mars, move ahead to, “Would the Earth life somehow be more adept at surviving on Mars than naturally evolved Mars life to the point that it would displace it and ruin the Mars ecosphere?” Seems very unlikely to me, so I would say no.
But if your answer to that is yes, then ask yourself if the Soviets properly sterilize their probes.
Mars has sufficient atmosphere to burn that car into a crisp considering the speed it’s going at, it’s not like it will slow down and park it self in Martian orbit neither do most probes which is why they come with a heatshield so they won’t burn up during aerobraking.
The heatshields are necessary so that the payload is stable aerodynamically and so that it isn't burned to crisp.
But the atmosphere is very thin so that it is currently major challenge to use it to slow anything down before it slams the ground.
While the temperature is governed by the speed of reentry (large speed relative to atmosphere molecules == high temperature) the heat transfer is depending also on the pressure. Low pressure == lower efficiency of heat transfer. Martian surface is around 600Pa, only 0.6% of Earth surface pressure.
This means, that entire Mars reentry profile is comparable to reentering just 0.6% of Earth atmosphere mass. This happens at around 40km (25miles) on Earth. It means, that if it is able to reach 40km above surface of Earth it is as if it already crossed entire Mars atmosphere.
It is also worth noting that the altitude of peak heating depends heavily on angle of reentry. In a steep reentry the period of peak heating happens much lower. For example, the peak heating for Space Shuttle was at about 70km, but that was only because the profile was kept purposefully extremely shallow to be done with heating before it reaches dense atmosphere.
You be the judge if it is enough to completely burn up Tesla Roadster, I find it difficult to reach any scientific study of Tesla Roadsters being thrown into Mars gravity well to watch results.
The FAA people in charge of issuing launch licenses worry about this kind of thing -- and commented a while ago that they'd lean heavily on the NASA Planetary Protection Officer for cases like this.
> “We don’t have the expertise in-house when it comes to planetary protection,” said Kelvin Coleman, acting deputy associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA. His office licenses commercial launches, a process that includes a payload review that would, potentially, include a planetary protection review. He said the FAA would “be leaning on” NASA to provide planetary protection expertise.
I always worry more about the risk that earth contains the only occurance of life in the universe and if something destroys earth then all life is destroyed forever.
"And millions of years later, after the Earth had long since gone quiet, the strange metal object swung closer to the red planet.
After all these years, passing the red planet so many times, it had caught enough wisps of gas from its atmosphere that it was going to finally come to rest — finally land there at last.
If landing is what you want to call it.
Down the machine came. It arced across the sky — slowing much more quickly now. And as it slowed it fell closer to the surface still, and got hotter and slower still...
When it finally hit the dunes of this world it scattered into all of its components. For miles and miles so many small metal and plastic parts from Earth flew and tumbled. And also, some stowaways.
What stowaways? Why, little organized corpuscles of organic chemicals. They were plentiful at one time on their home planet of Earth. But now, millions of years later, they found they had been travelers to a strange, new world.
Let there be life!"
:
Poorly channeling "The Last Question" in a way....
"the risk that earth contains the only occurance of life in the universe"
That seems almost impossibly unlikely considering the size of the universe. The number of Earth-like planets capable of supporting life is thought to exceed the number of grains of sand on our planet. Surely life will have evolved on at least a few of them!
Well, sure, on a few of them. And then what? Could be quite a leap for single-celled organisms to evolve into something resembling a flying insect. Given how successful insects have been on our planet, why would life evolve into anything more complex?
I'm actually not too worried that we're the only example of life in the universe. Instead I'm more worried that the galaxy is filled with planets containing nothing but slime mold.
It would be pretty trippy to think about. A planet not unlike our own in terms of atmosphere, water content, temperature, etc, and it's all slime mold. Entire mountains, covered in mold. Rolling hills of mold. Valleys thick with mold. Mold everywhere.
Ours may very well be the only planet in the universe where life evolved to one day ponder the possibility of a universe filled with mold. Multiverses and Moldyverses.
So, who knows, we may take it upon ourselves to spread life and make the universe less moldy.
Insects are actually very eolutionarily complex if you think about it. It’s much more logical for a single celled organism to develop say a membrane than a carapace. Especially since single celleds start in an ocean to our knowledge.
Humans are far from dying out and incredibly resilient. Things like climate change are not really about the human race surviving, more the scale and quality at which we continue to live. Both important but very different things.
I was speaking more to the resource utilization part of the statement, but sure: technically, there will probably still be humans left, in places, if we keep going at the rate we are.
If we're (as a species) lucky, that number might even exceed the minimum viable population.
The individuals in that circumstance probably won't feel very lucky, though.
I once saw a paper that calculated the probability distribution for the number of planets with intelligent life, using estimates from other papers and the best data currently available. IIRC, the conclusion was that it's likely that we're alone in the galaxy, and not that unlikely that we're alone in the universe.
IIRC, many low-probability events were in the development of simple life, so life itself might be surprisingly thin too.
Life got going on Earth very early on, now perhaps it was a lucky fluke, but it happened early.
When you consider that there are perhaps 100 Billion stars in a typical galaxy, and in the observable universe there are perhaps 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies, for me personally, I can only conclude that the universe is teeming with life.
Lets say Earth was a 1 in a million, that still means there are perhaps 1000 planets in our galaxy which contain life. Now if you multiply that by the number of galaxies you end up with billions.
Now intelligent life is a whole different beast, it could be that within a single galaxy civilisations come and go at different periods and never exist at the same time. Civilisations which are in different galaxies will find it extremely hard to contact each other.
> The number of Earth-like planets capable of supporting life is thought to exceed the number of grains of sand on our planet.
I believe the popular statement is more towards 'There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all beaches of earth.'
Once you bring in inland sand deposits etc this would probably not be true given the estimate (I've read but there must be other) of stars to beach sand grains is fairly close given the scope.
And as for planets, I'm not sure the ratio of 'earth like' planets to star ratio in the universe but would suspect this to be less than 1:1 given in the milky way this averages a less than 2 earth like planets for every 10 stars.
It's such a great analogy. Its the closest as I can come to understanding the scale of the universe we live in.
The Fermi Paradox deals with intelligent life (aliens) capable of being detected by other intelligent life (us). Life itself, however simple, is likely extremely abundant - there is even some inconclusive evidence that life once existed on Mars.
The fact of intellegent life arising somewhere else in the universe is statistically guaranteed. However, the sheer physical vastness of space and the timeframes that an intelligent species may be solvent mean that two separate intelligent species arising next to each other at the same time is almost a statitical impossibility. What the fermi paradox strongly supports is that faster than light/deep space travel in our little corner of the universe has not been figured out yet.
Sanitizing is considered when you're planning a planet landing. Space is big, so on the timescales of human civilization, the probability of actually hitting a planet by accident is negligible. If that Roadster lands on Mars in a hundred million years, we won't care.
If that roadster hits Mars and seeds Mars, that would be huge and interesting for science. Mostly because "How did something survive in space for that long?"
To be clear, they analyzed the likelihood that the Roadster would hit a planet (exceedingly small), not the likelihood that the Roadster is carrying biological life from Earth (which is exceedingly high).
We have very different definitions of extended periods of time. Elon's talking about it orbiting for millions of years. It's definitely not going to hit anything anytime soon.
That is still a good bet to make, it's very hard to hit anything even if you spent considerable effort specifically trying to. Also, there wasn't an intended orbit as much as there was a general direction and an "empty the tank" burn.
Yeah I saw that in another comment further down the chain. With all the hype around the Mars shot I assumed the ability to accurately place the car in orbit was a worthwhile goal. Not being a rocket scientist I wasn't aware that just knowing how far the thing can go is equally (or more?) interesting.
Awesome. That's great to hear. I was specifically wondering since this isn't just a metal satellite, there are cushions and fabric and stuff which can probably hold a lot of microbes.
You'd be surprised what even metal spacecraft contain. Not everything sent into deep space is sterilized, and even stuff sent to Mars contain a number of actual spores.
>its possible it could end up impacting something and potentially contaminating it with Earth organisms.
I dunno about you, but I would be really, really excited if other planets became infested with Earth organisms. I mean, that's kinda the whole reason for space travel in the first place!
I understand the argument for sterilized launches, etc. etc. but I can't help but wonder if it's holding terraforming back in the long run.
1. If there is life elsewhere, we want to make sure terrestrial lifeforms don't drive it to extinction before we get to see it.
2. We want to make sure that if life is found elsewhere that it isn't due to our own contamination of the site.
Actually, the real risk is that, by entering in contact with Earth biology, some forms of life incorporate them and develop in a toxic way.
The closest equivalent is inter-species infections, like the Avian or the Porcine flus. Having humans near unhealthy ducks or pigs constantly means mutated strains have a higher chance of carrying dangerous behaviour from one species to another.
There are a lot more to say around bio-chemistry basins, carbon-based vs silicon-based (or another compound) — but the idea is not exclusively to protect life there.
What is almost always ignored is that these animals would have feelings, and many would suffer enormously as a result of being created into Darwinian ecosystems in which predation, disease, and premature death are endemic. Theologians ask why a good God would create so much cruelty in nature. Future humans should likewise ponder whether it's morally acceptable to create new ecosystems containing vast amounts of suffering, or whether they should pause and seek more compassionate alternatives if they embark upon space colonization.
Understanding if any organisms can appear, evolve, be brought by asteroids and survive Mars conditions is probably even more important for terraforming than polluting the experiment with Earth's lifeforms.
Naturally Star Trek style terraforming is off in the far future (if at all), but I wonder if we're not too far away already from some more humble projects...
A genetically modified lichen, or fungus, that was designed as a stepping stone towards a better Martian biome, and a launch setup to seed them effectively isn't too far outside the bounds of present day work with genetics, and present day launch & deployment systems.
It's far less sexy, but a multi-generation approach to terraforming could yield a usable Mars without too much magic...
I would imagine that the lack of any kind of food source for bacteria, freezing cold temperatures, and space radiation should be enough to sanitize the vehicle from anything from earth. We're not talking about organisms that thrive at the depths of the ocean or tardigrades (although I'm sure someone will bring them up). We're talking about molds and bacterias that grow in warm, damp places like car seats and dirty human crevices. I would be surprised if they lasted out there and would be giddy if it survived long enough to grow further. That's an experiment, right there.
There's enough places for microbes to hide from radiation. On that short of a mission it wouldn't be surprising to see microbes. There are various microbes that can withstand the nominal radiation there. Would be much harder to survive the Van Allen belts and CMEs, but it is possible. If we were talking about a 100 year mission, that would be more surprising. Even hardy microbes don't like extended stays in vacuums and have to go into a hibernation state. There are bacteria that can survive for decades in a vacuum and low temperatures.
how short? because i thought the timeline we're talking about is that the Roadster is not going to run into any planet for as long as they've run simulations for, but it's theoretically possible that it might, at some point, hit something.
depends on the destination / trajectory of the object. This object has almost zero chance of ever hitting anything, so it doesn't have to go through the super crazy sanitizing that the Curiosity rover did.
That was probably true of the original trajectory, but now it's supposed to fly quite close to Ceres and scientists want updated data to see if a collision is likely.
“Quite close” is relative, given how ridiculously vast space is. The chances that they fire blindly out into space and just happen to hit Ceres seems so unlikely as to be basically impossible.
Nonetheless people are asking SpaceX for data to calculate the probability because they seem to think it's higher than 0 because of the unplanned trajectory.
The pale blue dot image gives some sense of scale here. Is it in the orbital plane of Ceres? I too would be interested in seeing the data results. If it's not orbiting on same plane then risks of collision drops further it would seem - would involve a plane intersection at the exact distance from sun Ceres orbit is at same time Ceres is there.
Of course as a practical matter, NASA can deny the use of their facilities to whomever they choose.
If SpaceX had their own launch facility, etc., are there legal restraints from contaminating another planet (possibly purposefully)? And if there are such restraints, what is their legal justification?
Obviously those booster rockets might get a bit tired after doing daily commuter flights for a decade or so, therefore there will also come a time when a third world country, e.g. Bangladesh becomes the place where old booster rockets go to be scrapped, so, next to the ships on the beach booster rockets crash down and small children working with no health and safety tear them to pieces.
None of which say anything about planetary contamination. GP is right that there is absolutely no laws enforcing “planetary protection” on commercial entities (thankfully).
UNOOSA, Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, Art. IX [1]:
"States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue
studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct
exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination..."
Note that State parties are responsible for the actions of their nationals later in the paragraph.
Is the above wrong? I admit to not being a space person.
Wow that is selective quoting. The law is “harmful contamination of the Earth”. Nice use of “...” there. That text is only about bringing stuff back to earth.
Read your link again. That sentence, the only one which says harmful contamination, refers to the earth, And only the earth. It is very explicit about that. I don’t know what else to say.
Not to wade into your fight, but danaliv is right. Here is (most of) the sentence:
“States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter....”
The “their harmful contamination” part clearly refers to something plural (the moon and other celestial bodies). The second part would be redundant if those were sources, rather than recipients of contaimination.
Yeah but NASA doesn’t get to just say no out of spite or anything, which legaly speaking is what a planetary protection objection would be. There is no statute they can point to that says commercial entities can’t litter the solar system with microbes if they want.
Article IX of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies reads in part (emphasis added):
"State Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose."
This conversation is about whether NASA would object to an FAA-issued launch license on the basis of potential contamination, not whether there are police on the moon.
Right; NASA would have to decide to observe some unenforceable treaty. They also have to decide whether to launch on national leprechaun day or not. I'm not sure why either is an issue NASA would step up to try and enforce.
There is also the fire extinguisher in the passenger foot-well, spaceman can just use that to correct his course and get to Mars, maybe to wait for the tow truck there...
I think the people behind this launch would have given some thought to this. I mean they're quite thorough and intelligent people. As in so clever and interested in the subject that they could be ..... Rocket scientists... :P
> Tersicoccus phoenicis is a member of the bacterial family Micrococcaceae. It has only been found in two spacecraft assembly clean room facilities and is resistant to the methods normally used to clean such facilities. The species name is derived from tersi, Latin for clean; coccus, Greek for berry; and phoenicis, from NASA's Phoenix lander, the spacecraft being prepared when these bacteria were first discovered.
Very real concern. A lot of effort goes into sterilising craft intended to land on or impact other planets. If we fail to do so, we run a real risk of seeding earth life on those planets and forever ruining our chances to test them for the existence of life prior to contamination.
The prioneers and experts of the field see it as a problem. The uninformed opinion of the general public doesn't carry much weight on this matter.
People who don't see it as a problem should take the time to read one of dozens published papers outlining the dangers and problems it will pose. If they then still don't feel it's a problem, they're encouraged to publish their own research supporting that view.
Some do and some don't. In terms of knowing about life on other planets of course it would be ideal to maintain planetary quarantine protocols and so on. The problem for exobiologists is that given the absence of visible life in our local system, any life that does exist is fossilized or fragile, and of course we would want to approach it with the same delicacy that we would any other fragile thing.
On the other hand, our solar system is but one among many and the longer we hesitate in exploring this one the longer it will be before we are able to explore others. TAn excess of caution can become an excuse for inaction. If earth is an oasis in a planetary desert, the way to find other life is not by maintaining extreme caution about disturbing the surrounding sand dunes but by trekking across them in search of other oases.
While not everyone likely sees seeding Earth life on another planet as a problem, I think most would want to know if life existed there prior to that, since it helps us answer quite a few fundamental problems.
I'm not sure why I used "problems". It's obvious to me I meant "questions", so likely I just misspoke. Knowing if life exists elsewhere at at certain minimal levels answers some fundamental questions.
> The United States is a signatory to an international treaty that stipulates that exploration must be conducted in a manner that avoids of the transportation of living organisms to celestial bodies.
First of all the US is part of a treaty, so if we do introduce organisms to other plants we are violating the treaty.
> We wouldn't want to go to Mars and "discover" life - only to figure out later that we brought it with us! Scientists also want to study the planet and any life that might be there in its original "pristine state."
Ultimately I guess it comes down to why you are sending something to space. If your goal is science then contaminating the planetary environment with organisms is not great. If your goal is colonization (which I guess is SpaceX goal) then you probably wouldn't care. But I still think it's something that should be considered.
The link is wrong. I work in this space and I know of no such international law regarding biological contamination, unless they are grossly misinterpreting the outer space treaty way beyond what it says and the context in which it is written.
It’s totally misquoted. The line is “harmful contamination of the Earth” and the concern was about Apollo bringing back samples and the US taking proper quarantine safeguards ON EARTH.
There's no scenario where human beings can land on Mars without biologically contaminating it. This is a powerful argument against human exploration of that planet. This is why God made robots.
There are worse places to be stuck than Earth. The food here is good!
A an argument in similar vein for human exploration of Mars is that it's cool as fuck. The same way people enjoy food, many people believe they'll profoundly enjoy space exploration.
What's wrong with introducing biological material to mars? I am so confused as to the rational here. Is it just so some scientists can get the glory of saying the discovered life on Mars and we're sure it's not from earth? What is the practical value of that anyway except some scientist's vanity?
I don't think it matters. If it's genetically interesting, that will increase our understanding of biology, but otherwise the practical implications are nil. Profound philosophical implications are a joke. You and the rest of the world would forget about it in a week.
Look at the UFO videos the pentagon released in December. No one cares.
Yes, but there are two ways to approach that: cautiously explore apparently barren planets and eventually, maybe, find evidence of primitive life life, either ongoing or ancient; or explore as widely and as prolifically as possible.
The opposite. If there is evidence of life on Mars, even microbial life, we'd potentially be contaminating that life and, if it didn't kill it, it might create strains of bacteria that are resistant to anything on Earth. If that ever made its way back to Earth, it might kill a large chunk of the population. We literally have no idea what the consequences of life and growth in those conditions are.
Discovery of extraterrestrial life would have huge scientific and practical consequences. The rationale behind not needlessly contaminating other planets it to not make related science more difficult than it already is. It's not meant to hold forever, though - eventually practical interests will outweigh scientific benefits of keeping things pristine, and people will get the green light.
The practical value is that if there is uncontaminated life on Mars, scientists will be able to study it and hopefully open up new avenues of scientific inquiry. It's a research question and one that likely would contribute immense value if realized.
Specifically, it might teach us things about the prevalence of extromophiles, which promises to open up the universe to us.
Either we use extremophiles to establish beachheads in otherwise uninhabitable places, or we adapt ourselves or other beneficial organisms with the information we learn.
For instance proteins that protect against high or low temperatures.
Less speculatively, krill can be fed to things we already eat, and some krill survive on a diet entirely comprised of extremophiles.
The detailed study of alien biology may provide insight useful for some practical application. Any specifics are wild speculation. Maybe we can produce an artificial pancreas that performs the function without registering as foreign to the immune system.
Here's one: when you get there and are looking for extra-terrestrial life, you won't know if the things you find are native, or if they got there on their own somehow, or if you brought them with you. Maybe you don't care, but I think that knowing the answer to that question would be super interesting.
It would, but there's a bunch of other celestial bodies that offer at least as much potential, eg Europa. I share your interest, but not to degree of stopping all other activity while you indulge your curiosity, because other people would like to go and explore directly. I'm not saying just ignore the issue and barrel ahead, but would-be exobiologists should make ambitious and timely proposals of what they intend to sample, what they expect to find, and how long they need to check, in order to give other people a chance to pursue their interests.
I think before you ask a question like this, you should estimate the likelihood of something like this happening or ask someone for help on how to do that.
These sorts of questions are so boring, so easy to ask, and instantly derail the discussion.
Of course its low, but its still something that needs to be considered as more and more commercial organizations gain the ability to launch things into our solar system. Obviously an organization like SpaceX has a commercial focus rather than a scientific one like NASA. The more stuff gets launched by more people the more likely of contamination from something.
Between SpaceX, Blue Origin or any other space travel initiatives that end up succeeding we are going to end up with a lot more stuff in space which isn't necessarily going to be friendly to scientific efforts as in the past.
None of what you said conflicts with my comment and suggested question re-formulation.
The world is filled with an unlimited number of concerns about infinitesimal risk. Your question remains boring and distracting, and, as pointed out elsewhere, the risk is not likely enough to be important.
And yet, it is a very important question that people will always ask first. Exactly how low are the probabilities? This was a major concern with the bankruptcy of Iridium that concerned the President. The insurers at the time wouldn't touch it. And bad things happen:
That's true. My point was that interplanetary contamination is a concern that needs to be addressed, even if the probabilities are low. If nothing else, since it is one of the first questions that is going to get asked, including by the USG.
This is why I suggest that the question should be "what are the chances of a collision?" not "what has SpaceX done to mitigate this?" since the former question admits that the asker does not have the background to assess anything, while the later suggests SpaceX has done something wrong if they haven't taken concrete actions.
As it turns out, the difference in probability between the things you mention and interplanetary collisions is astronomical -- like dozens or more orders of magnitude -- and a minute of Googling shows that NASA frequently satisfies the planetary protection rules by ensuring that non-sanitized parts of inbound spacecraft miss the planet on the first pass (even though they will in principle be circling in the same general orbit for a billion years).
I realize deep space collision risk is very low. I saw a talk with Alan Stern about New Horizons where he answers someone's question about collision avoidance in the asteroid belt that on a trip out to Pluto you are unlikely to encounter anything larger than a grain of sand. But rather than acting annoyed with the person who questioned him, he answered the question well, and I still remember his answer. And let use not forget that space exploration has ethically questionable choices and "improbable" events occur in the past (e.g., Laika, artificial radiation belts from nukes, debris from an RF reflecting foil cloud).
I don't understand. The question you link to is about orbit stability, not the risk of collision and planetary protection. The risk of collision is infinitesimal regardless.
But in any case, I'm happy with with earnest questions about math/science. What's boring and distracting are these expressions of concern about rule violations. Consider: would the original comment of NathanKP have been popular if he asked "I wonder what the chances are that the Tesla will collide with an asteroid?" No. Maybe someone would have quickly pointed to a calculation or estimate, but it would't be at the top of the thread without the emotional appeal that someone somewhere might be breaking a rule.
This is true. The engines overperformed and they're going a lot further than they meant to. This is better than anticipated news.
It's only bad if you're REALLY focused on the Tesla "going to Mars", which it was never really going to do, because it would need to slow down once it got to Mars to stay in orbit around it. What we've done is prove capability. Getting to Mars is 100% possible, and we've also proven fault tolerance ... that is, we have enough fuel to spare that we can make correction-burns if necessary during the trip to Mars.
> that is, we have enough fuel to spare that we can make correction-burns if necessary during the trip to Mars.
Stage 2 of the Falcon would not be used for long flights. This was the longest it ever coasted (6 hours). Any longer, and you run into all sorts of limitations: running out of batteries, RP-1 freezing, and LOX boiling off.
For longer trips, stage 2 would separate after the earth escape burn and the craft's own propulsion system would take over.
I was thinking of right transfer orbit combined with exactly right aerobraking, though I'm not sure if Mars has a dense enough atmosphere even if you were aiming for a flyby 1 millimeter above the surface (and that's assuming an indestructible Roadster)...
You need a third body to pull that off, and I think Mars’s moons are too small to be useful for this.
Looking at practical considerations rather than just theoretical, you also need the ability to perform course corrections along the way. The initial trajectory won’t be precise enough to make it work from just the departure burn.
Yep. Real-Scale Solar System provides that. There are also mods to add real-world rockets (like the Falcon Heavy) and real-world aerodynamics (Ferram Aerospace Research).
To do a gravity assist you do not need anything more than Newtonian two-body interaction. KSP already has that.
You can think of it as a small ball (the vehicle) bouncing of a big heavy ball (the planet), but the forces are not those of elastic compression, rather those of gravity.
You're agreeing with his point. The plan was not to orbit Mars.
However, your language sounds like they were going to circularize at 'about the distance of mars', which they were not (that too would have required a burn months from now). The plan they'd previously briefed was an elliptical orbit where the aphelion is ~Mars' orbitial distance (~1.5AU) and the perihelion is still at Earth's orbital distance (~1AU). However, with the extended burn, they got the aphelion up to 2.61 AU.
It's overshot in the sense that the PR materials they released showed it making a perfect Mars transfer orbit. Apparently Musk said "If the third burn goes as we hope, the Tesla will get as far away as 380 to 450 million km from Earth." Their aphelion is right around 390 500 000km, so just a bit above the lower bound.
Distance from Earth and solar aphelion aren't the same thing. The former will be larger by 300 million km (the diameter of Earth's orbit) when Earth is on the opposite side of the sun. It's unclear which value Musk was referring to.
> So, the reason I asked was because of not having a source. Did this come from SpaceX or someone authoritative who has done the math?
SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0.
> SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0.
But one of the reasons I asked was not because I was worried about whether it would hit something on a short timescale (even though there is a non-zero chance it could happen). I'm aware of the vastness of space.
I was curious about what happens over 10, 10^3, 10^9, 10^12, 10^100 orbits later.
The answer is: over 10 orbits - no. Over 10^3 orbits - no. Over 10^9 and more - nobody really cares. By that time the Sun will be halfway to going cold.
Your answers seem to be about whether or not there will be a collision at those time points.
My curiosity is about visualizing the orbit over time (which includes a non-zero possibility of collision).
P.S. I doubt you would disagree that speculating about where the Roadster will be when the Sun will be getting colder is fun, and not 'nobody really cares.'
Of course, such simulators are hard and expensive and mostly approximations, but doesn't hurt to ask about what options are out there.
On time scales that large the exact orbit is unpredictable, see the Pioneer Anomaly [0] where the RTGs heat radiating away provides a tiny but non zero deceleration, over huge time spans even tiny forces add up. On top of that it's going to be slightly perturbed by Earth, Mars, and Jupiter in ways that can only really be modeled not solved explicitly.
> but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty.
While this is on average true (i.e. including interstellar space) , it doesn't apply to an orbit within the solar system with large AU orbits: Jupiter's massive gravitational field will make the Tesla's orbit unstable.
> The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0.
There's no way of knowing this without calculating and modeling the trajectory, but SpaceX is not publicly providing this information. I understand the potential for bad PR from clickbait headlines like "Tesla to crash into Earth in 2052"* (*according to a Ugandan teen space enthusiast/prodigy, modelling in KSP)
It doesn't matter if it's unstable - as long as it was not carefully aimed to hit something, "space is big and empty" means that a random unstable orbit is exceedingly likely not to hit anything for a very, very, very long time.
There's no way of knowing this without calculating and modeling the trajectory, but you can still be 99.99% sure that it's not going to hit anything for thousands or even millions of years even without extra information. As the parent poster said, the chance is close to 0.
It would be rather ironic if Elon's personal Mars lander got into a collision with his roadster. Hope he took out liability insurance on the roadster ;)
Well, if the recent progress in the space sector continues, I'm confident that in the next few decades someone will make a mission to rendezvous with the Roadster, just for the kicks.
The only way to project the path of an object in the solar system is to computationally model the solar system and then run the simulation forward. Obviously space programs like NASA and ESA have such models; that's how they get space probes like New Horizons or Rosetta to their destinations.
Interestingly, I've read that these simulations use Newtonian physics, not general relativity, to model the solar system. At interplanetary speeds, the error between the two is just too small to matter.
So if you want to project the orbit for the "lifetime" of the Roadster, you'd have to just run the simulation forward until it finds a collision or the sun burns out.
This would take a lot of energy and time... it would not be worth it.
The main reason is that interplanetary space is very empty in general, so without running any simulation we can guesstimate that an accidental collision is very unlikely.
Also, probably no one really cares if the Roadster hits an asteroid 513 million years from now.
Finally, a physical model simulating that many objects is chaotic--even eensy weeny teeny tiny little errors will compound over time and produce a divergence from reality. I doubt anyone has characterized this drift beyond the horizon needed to plan missions--a few decades at most. So even if you ran the model forward for 513 million model years, there might be no way to constrain the accuracy of the final predicted location of the Roadster. Heck, maybe the difference between Newton and GR would matter at these time scales.
There's also just forces that will be hard to characterize in a model, eg thermal recoil where the heat radiating off an object produces a tiny acceleration in the opposite direction. The roadster has black panels that will heat up more than the rest of the body work. Then there's other tiny forces like the solar wind. All tiny but over huge time spans their influence keeps widening the error bounds on the simulation.
> Is there any simulation for projecting the path of the Roadster over its life? Kerbal Space Program?
KSP has a very simplified model, and doesn't even offer full n-body simulation. You can try GMAT [1] as a general purpose orbital dynamics tool; it's fun to play with. There's also plenty of Python libraries for gravitational dynamics available, pykep being an example. Of course, you'll have to know the precise Roadster orbit parameters, and this is a problem.
(Oh man, I think it was a stinker. I'm a big Stephenson fan and I was really disappointed. Just one point: It was so freighted with exposition and so thin on dialog and character development, "show, don't tell" was out the window.)
Maybe. Asteroid mining would be tremendously profitable, but not without a huge initial capital investment, the likes of which humanity has likely never seen (not hyperbole).
But like the age old adage, you get rich by selling the pick axes, not by mining for gold. Elon probably figures that launches are where the money is, not the actual mining itself.
There is no profit to be had right now in mining stuff in space and sending it down to Earth.
There is however plenty of profits to be made in space, when we'll have a full space economy. Asteroid mining is an important part of both the future economy and of the current process of bootstrapping that economy.
The idea is to use material mined in space, combined with manufacturing and processing in space, to create products and resources to be used in space, for space operations. Ultimately some of that may return to Earth, but the main goal is to avoid spending money on lifting things from Earth.
Low gravity (e.g. the moon) and zero gravity environments could have manufacturing advantages that are used to create projects that are shipped to earth.
In the longer term, yes; right now, nothing game-changing on the horizon.
The best example would be the work of Made In Space[0]. They've started manufacturing optical fiber on the ISS, where they can reach much greater medium purity than what one can do on Earth. It can, in principle, make fiber optics installations cheaper (less need for repeaters along the way), but the savings are entirely eaten by launch costs (and lack of economies of scale).
The primary output of asteroid mining and space manufacturing will naturally be utilized in space, because we need to bootstrap a pretty large and self-sustaining economy to be able to profitably ship useful quantities of useful stuff downwell.
Low or zero gravity can also be a hindrance; how do you mine an asteroid if every wack of the pickaxe also propels you away from said asteroid? Clearly asteroids won't be mined with pickaxes, this is an illustration that gravity is in fact critical for all known terrestrial manufacturing processes!
When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important.
Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.
Yup. Zero-g introduces absurd amounts of challenges, only showing just how much everything we've learned over past couple thousand years is dependent on living at the bottom of a gravity well.
For those curious about asteroid mining per se, there are plenty of ideas being prototyped right now - including the more obvious ones like two-part drills spinning in opposite direction, and the less obvious ones like using concentrated sunlight to heat up the asteroid and collecting the matter that outgasses from the hot spot.
Change "embedded explosives" to the concentrated solar light I mentioned, and you've essentially described a mission proposal that I've seen in a NASA report.
Space mining companies currently have two or three possible products they usually talk about: platinum group metals, helium 3, and water.
Helium 3 would come from the lunar soil. The problem is that it is EXTREMELY rare in the lunar soil, so you'd have to process ridiculous amounts of it. It is ostensibly used as a fusion fuel, but it's actually a tougher fuel to use than deuterium/tritium, and no one has even made D/T fusion breakeven, yet. The only real advantage is that helium 3 produces fewer neutrons than D/T does. But Protium-Boron11 produces even less. And you can make Helium 3 by just making Tritium and letting it decay. So Helium 3 isn't a real market.
Platinum group metals are supposed to be this huge market. But the total value of the platinum market (and the vast majority of the PGM market is platinum by value) is just $5 billion per year. The global commercial space telecom market is already on the order of $100 billion per year. And even here, processing platinum in orbit is a HUGE technical challenge. It's in relatively small concentrations (though perhaps still better than Earth), it's not like there's a big chunk of platinum that you just need to grab.
And water. Water is supposed to be the huge, near-term space commodity. $10,000 per kilogram, "The oil of space." ...except the only current market for water is on ISS, where it is occasionally delivered by Dragon, Progress, and Cygnus. Water is not used for propulsion for any current satellites; instead, they use hydrazine, xenon, or a bipropellant hypergolic combination (usually including hydrazine).
The only other use is for upper stage propellant. But that'd require splitting the water, refrigerating the resultant gases, storing them in deeply cryogenic conditions, then delivering them to the upper stage. This is all possible, but that is only good for a small part of the trip to orbit, the part from LEO to GEO. But the starting assumption of water being super expensive is based on a faulty assumption that launch costs will remain really high, i.e. that reusable rockets won't work. If Falcon Heavy works, the cost to orbit is only like ~$1000/kg to LEO. And if BFR works (first orbital test as early as 2021/2022), costs could be as low as $10/kg. So you have to assume reusable rocketry isn't really viable. But to get water from, say, the Moon requires a reusable launch infrastructure of some kind, usually a reusable lunar lander/ascender. And usually, in order to be cost effective, it has to be totally autonomous. So you're assuming fully autonomous, refurbishment-free launch from the Moon is going to be cheap to develop but reusable rockets on Earth won't. And you're also necessarily assuming that space market growth won't be buoyed by much cheaper space launch, so you're looking at a small part (upper stage propellant) of a relatively small market (the current space launch market, which is a tiny fraction of the space telecom market). And you have to build a bunch of infrastructure on the Moon and in Earth orbit to make it work, it'll probably take over a decade to get working... Why not just invest in reusable rockets on the Earth first?
So I feel like the business case for water mining also doesn't make any sense, in spite of the difference in delta-v needed to reach orbit.
(The caveat to this is if you have a Moon base or something... in which case you already have a need for water on the Moon itself and much of the infrastructure already in place. That is reasonable, IMHO.)
If lifting things from the Earth becomes super cheap (and it most certainly can), then the vast majority of the business case for space mining goes away, and you're left mostly with mining platinum group metals for Earth use (which isn't a very big market). The narrative needs to be rewritten to account for reusable space launch.
Except it's hard to argue that Elon Musk does anything for profit. Both Tesla and SpaceX are examples of businesses set up to disrupt an industry and worry about money later.
I agree that he does not see the value of using money as a scoring system for his success, but making a profit, I am sure he is very interested in that. Profitable ventures are how he had the $100 million to create SpaceX. Profits of venture after venture until he acquired enough capital to actually start and fund a new aerospace company and be the largest investor in Tesla.
I would think precious metals get a lot less precious if they start falling out of the sky and I am pretty skeptical about other Earthside uses being profitable at all.
People that go try to live in space are going to have a hard time of it so I wouldn't expect profit from supplying space industry either (the longer missions cosmonauts and astronauts have completed have had grave physical consequences, we aren't adapted to low g environments).
That's entirely because of the cost of lifting to orbit. If resources were available at reasonable cost, demand would soar. It would be the largest expansion of commerce since the discovery of the new world. It cannot be underestimated the impact this would have on human development.
Current space industry is dominated by intensively manufactured goods (satellites) that provide enormous value to ground based users. Having literal tons of steel available isn't going to help with the intensively manufactured part.
I can see space hotels or whatever, but that is not a huge market, even with Musky launch prices.
It enthuses that colonization should be the end goal because it will drive funding. I remain unconvinced that there are actually enough incredibly wealthy people that want to go die in space to drive a vast economy.
Skim the first 6 parts too; they deal more with what is now than what might be in the far future.
There's enough interest, demand and money in current space activities to justify a small cislunar economy; after that happens, well, hard to predict, but I think you're underestimating the amount of people with ideas about what to do in the Solar System.
The cost of colonies becomes small(er) with the incredible resources available in space. It wasn't the incredibly wealthy that colonized the New World.
It could be colonies on the Moon or whatever. But I'm thinking a space-based industry to produce more space-based industry. If it could be self-sufficient, the question of "what does this do for Earth?" becomes moot. Like the Americas are not here to serve the old world.
Getting started, it could be a scheme of space development futures. Bet on the value of things in space, which puts money into the development of more things in space.
By 'in space' of course we mean everywhere in the Universe except tiny 'ol Earth.
Exactly. This is a chicken-and-egg problem, and to break out of it, you need to address supply and demand simultaneously.
Asteroid mining isn't happening in a vacuum (well, it is in a physical one, but not metaphorical). Fortunately, there are people working on using the mined material to manufacture things in space too; missions plans are being sketched around those capabilities.
Tethers Unlimited is working on ways to build antennas larger than could be flow up on a rocket in GEO, I'm sure they're pay for refined metal once that gets going. Any location with humans in space would probably like to buy some loose gravel just for greater radiation/impact shielding, especially for anything outside the Van Allen belt. Space is currently a $300 billion industry and I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell $1 billion worth of raw materials. It's getting an asteroid to Earth for that cheap that's the really hard part.
It'd still be more cost-efficient to e.g. mine for gold under the ocean or in the Antarctic rather than send gear up to space to do that.
If we had a huge solid gold asteroid (how would that occur?) floating in a very close, very convenient orbit then maybe it would be cost-effective to send a ship to connect, re-orbit and land it without vaporizing; but anything realistic simply wouldn't be worth the launch effort&cost.
Not to mention that the idea of things just falling out of the sky when we need them sounds great to me.
Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
It's less fun when you realize that being able to drop any meaningful amount of material from space is equivalent to having a weapon of mass destruction.
(This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
Earth does not really have a shortage of most things, so I don't think there is much use for Asteroid mining in the next 10,000 years unless people are also moving into space.
EX: Just the worlds oceans has 5 lb of gold per person on the planet. It's far more abundant on land, but we really don't have a lot of need for gold.
I'd rather gather them from the asteroid belt if possible so we could stop/limit the terrible effects of mining on the environment on earth. Also if we can setup manufacturing and fuel creation in space it would let us build larger and go farther because we wouldn't have to lift the pieces up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. At the very least we could build the bodies of spacecraft and fuel them in space and just lift harder to build stuff like electronics from Earth.
As long as we are just sending satellites up into LEO that takes far less energy than you might think. Flying around the world or getting to space are not that far apart. SpaceX for example is only worth ~20 billion because there is simply less demand for rockets and they cost less than many assume.
Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home.
PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.
Even short of full colonization sourcing materials from space will allow much larger structures and shapes that would be difficult. Ultimately right now we're severely limited by the fairings, inflatables like Bigelow Aerospace solves some of that but ultimately there still limits to the volumes.
I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.
260 billion cubic miles worth of asteroids without going into space. Sure we are currently limited to a tiny fraction of that but start processing magma directly is an option.
Each person’s 5kg of gold also comes with a bonus of about 1/6 of a cubic kilometer of seawater. Hopefully yours is near a beach so you don’t have to haul it too far.
But we do have a need for rare earth metals. Not as much as we thought we did in 2011, but it would still be a fantastic boon to manufacturing.
It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.
rare earth metals are not nearly as rare as you might think.
The problem is they don't concentrate that much in any one area not that they can't be extracted for most places. So, we could extract them at 100x the current rate for the next 1,000 years and recycle them forever.
If everyone consumed like an American we’d need something like 4x Earths. There are not enough resources on this planet unless westerners start scaling back their consumption and members of developing societies scale their ambitions down to match the new, lower consumption models of the West.
Then making that consumption sustainable and reducing waste would be a far better investment than pipe dreams of asteroid mining.
Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.
There's enough resources (especially since they don't just disappear and can be recovered by recycling), afaik, except for food - that's what we're consuming too fast to replenish.
If you mean the Belt, then not really. The current iterator of asteroid mining will focus on near-Earth asteroids primarily, as they're close - exactly what you need for testing and for building a cislunar economy.
A friend of mine who works at Tesla says the reason they put the roadster on top of the Falcon Heavy is they wanted to test how well the self-driving system works in outer space.
How long is the video feed of the Tesla Roadster supposed to last? It'd be cool to see how a car looks like after several years of drifting around in space.
Question I've been wondering about for the giant Tesla advertisement is if they had to make any modifications to the roadster to support being in space? The background space temperature is -455 F and obviously also zero gravity.
Wikipedia says 140k to LEO, 37k to Mars and 7k to Pluto. Still, there's excess capacity there if a roadster is about 3k. Does seem like they sent it as far out as they could with that payload.
the other thing is you're looking at max distance with full recovery of all cores (despite the failure to recover the middle core). If you went fully expendable on all cores you'd get a LOT more payload a LOT further.
Well, if today you don't believe what Elon says wrt. space then you have to be completely out of touch with reality. I would be surprised of Woźniak dismissed SpaceX.
He delivered the Roadster. He delivered one of the highest rated, safest, highest performance cars in history with the S. He's delivering the 3. He's very clearly going to deliver on the semi-truck and the new Roadster.
He delivered on dramatic battery distance capability for the S and 3, proving a lot of skeptics wrong. There was near universal skepticism that an electric car could do what the S proved it could in terms of distance, until Musk & Co. delivered on that.
From early on, few thought Tesla as a business would make it this far. Survival was unexpected, much less thriving. Instead, they're chasing down $15 to $18 billion in sales for fiscal 2018. Up from $3 billion in 2014. And they've completely altered the entire multi-trillion dollar automobile industry, refocusing it nearly entirely on an all-electric future for every automaker.
He delivered on the Australian power arrangement. In fact, it has worked so well, Australia is interested in more and bigger arrangements.
He delivered on Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and reusable rockets. All of which proved a lot of skeptics wrong. Almost nobody thought SpaceX would pull off reusable rockets in the beginning.
All in all, extraordinarily embarrassing for the people that have repeatedly doubted Musk. His batting average is tremendous when it comes to actually delivering, this is especially true given the nature of the things in question.
That is debatable. The goal was to be delivering 5000 by last December. They've currently delivered something like 200 out of a half-million preorders. I like what Tesla is doing but people absolutely should be skeptical of Musk w.r.t. Tesla.
They’ve been abundantly clear since the test payload was announced that it was not actually going to Mars, but rather into a heliocentric orbit with an aphelion around Mars’s orbit.
Are you under the impression that mistakes never get made in rocket science? Because a naive reading of your comment would indicate strong agreement with me, i.e. rocket science is really hard and mistakes are made.
My hope is that the SpaceX people did the same for this Tesla. Otherwise it would be rather reckless especially since now it is clear there wasn't a specific controlled orbit path, just a burn to launch it as far as possible, and now its possible it could end up impacting something and potentially contaminating it with Earth organisms.