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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love that Musk is putting a car into Mars orbit. Assuming mankind doesn't have an extinction event (or dark ages event), it is extremely likely we'll populate the solar system over the next millenia. In 200 years, Martian children can look up in the sky and know that one of the quickly moving visible satellites is a hilarious, old-Earth car. Depending on how accessible orbit is from planets over the next couple hundred years, it could very well be some sort of space station museum.

Or, imagine we hit a dark age and bounce back, and this event is lost to history. Five hundred years later we manage to get some people to Mars orbit and they find a fucking car in a capsule with a little mannequin stuffed into it flinging around the planet at hundreds of kph.

All while it's blasting David Bowie over their radios.

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Is it okay to put unnecessary stuff in the orbits around our or other planets? Isn't this space trash that can potentially be problematic for future endeavors? Are we creating problems for ourselves to satisfy our vanity?

Mars is really big relative to a car. You could probably put dozens or hundreds of cars in orbit around Mars without any added difficulty.

Anyway I wouldn't normally consider it to be space trash, but in this case it's pretty much just a big Tesla ad billboard orbiting the planet so I agree with you sentiment

Space debris is a huge problem. One car gets hit bit tiny debris at any point, and the number of debris flying around multiplies.

Not where it’s going.

Space debris is a problem in a small number of high-traffic Earth orbits. There is almost nothing in existence on this random Hohmann transfer solar orbit where the car will live for hundreds of millions of years.

Space is big.

It's going into a heliocentric orbit, and people will surely be tracking it.

If it gets to be a problem in the future, it will have so much historical value that someone will launch a mission to go fetch the Roadster and bring it home to Mars.

It's fun to imagine the technology SpaceX might come up with for that mission.

I'm wondering if they could make it work after retrieval.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24365/can-i-drive-...

the standard cargo for these missions is a chunk of cement. If you want to test a rocket you have to throw something up there.

It probably does not add a measurable amount of junk to hit than is already up there in the form of natural rocks.

Though if in the future human population hits the quadrillions and we are living on all 8 planets we should probably start worrying about our space trash.

It's not in orbit around Earth, and won't be visible from Earth. As soon as it boosts out of its parking orbit, it will be orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars.

Also, there is not any danger of stuff "crowding" out there because the amount of space between Earth and Mars is really quite extremely huge.

It would be cooler if it was going to be in Mars orbit, but it is just going into an elliptical solar orbit that will vary in distance from the sun between Earth orbit and and Mars orbit.

Hmm, they said heliocentric several times. But it’s a cool orbit no matter how you slice the the pork chop. Pretty sure this is intended to be similar to a “mars cycler” orbit. A “mars cycler” is an interplanetary space station which follows a sort of transfer orbit between earth and mars. This provides a cushy radiation shielded environment for interplanetary travelers and economizes on propulsion by leveraging gravity assist. IIRC some guy named Aldrin came up the gist of the design.

it's in orbit around the sun:

> Following launch, Falcon Heavy’s second stage will attempt to place the Roadster into a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun.

It's not going into Mars orbit. It's kind of weird that Musk never corrected that. Even his tweet from December said "mars orbit."

Well it's going into mars' orbit of the sun, and then immediately continuing on through...

It'll become a touristic attraction.

Part of me enjoys it, but a big part of hates that he put a car there. I don't associate cars with anything good, only bad.

Why? General opposition to motorized transport?

Opposition to non-bipedal forms of transport?

Or is it opposition to the type of urban planning that is centered around the car more than the pedestrian?

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