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Comment by phyller | Hacker News Reader

If I was Elon Musk, and launching something like this, the reason my Roadster would be the payload is because I would be attempting to land it on the Moon or Mars. It's electric, so it should be able to drive around :)

I wonder if that is possible. The weight of the car is much less than the 140,000 pound payload it could carry, so it could be sent much further if they wanted to.

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Not going to land or even orbit Mars.

From a response from Elon Musk:

> It’s going near Mars. He said it’ll be placed in “a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun.” What he means by this is what’s sometimes called a Hohmann transfer orbit, an orbit around the Sun that takes it as close to the Sun as Earth and as far out as Mars. This is a low-energy orbit; that is, it takes the least amount of energy to put something in this orbit from Earth. That makes sense for a first flight.

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/elon-musk-on-the-roadster-to-ma...

It's great that he is launching his own car as the payload but I would really like to see that replaced by an Oldsmobile Starfire.

The tesla sadly lacks the ability to do a propulsive landing on mars, they'd need a sky crane like Curiosity had - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Sky_cr...

If he manages to land his Roadster on Mars (intact - which is probably the hardest part), how many stars will it get on a NHTSA crash test ?

I was going to reply just to tell you how dumb that is, but then I double checked, and the Falcon Heavy can put a 38,000 lb payload into Mars injection orbit. Thats enough for a big set of retro-rockets, a sky-crane landing system, some solar cells to recharge it, and a robot to drive it around.

For reference, Curiosity weighed 2000 lbs, somewhere between 50% and 75% of what the new roadster will weigh. The MSL payload that landed Curiosity weighed 8,600 lbs total, so yeah- you could probably land two or three roadsters!

I'm pretty sure the batteries and motors are cooled by air (directly or not).

They're not going to try to land the car and drive it - The car is going to be put into orbit around mars indefinitely, so that one day an alien species can find it, long after we're gone.

that needs to be a plot point for the new ST series :-)

It won't be orbiting Mars, it will pass by Mars.

Cool idea haha. I'd guess it'd probably get messed up from lack of air and/or too much exposure to radiation or something though.

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