SpaceX’s Big Rocket, the Falcon Heavy, Finally Reaches the Launchpad

Sending an expensive car into space: no wonder people hate the land of the Haves and Have Nots so much.

Not sure that there’s zero cost to the taxpayer if we’re paying for the spy satellites and launch fees, but sure as heck beats $1 billion per launch. Now if we only had the same national consensus around paying for social services for our citizens and made it as appealing as rockets and cars...

Is there still a chance to strap our POTUS into that roadster before liftoff? Perhaps the added weight will prevent entering into orbit and falling into North Korea. But the idea of having the orange one sitting in a red Tesla roadster floating in space for eternity sounds appealing to me. Best of luck on the launch Elon.

Apparently, Elon would rather think of one of his cars drifting endlessly through space than give it to somebody who could actually use it. That's one difference between him and me.

What was not mentioned here was an effort to make a Rocket using the Space Shuttle Engines which were and are quite advanced in design and well proven in flight. Someone in Washington spiked the idea.

Almost a half century ago we sent Americans to the moon with less computer power than is sitting on my laptop. That feat was done in the name of all Americans by our government, and all Americans rejoiced, feeling a sense of collective, national pride even in the middle of the extremely divisive Viet Nam War. Then Americans began to think small, looking inward, electing leaders who also thought small. We are now in the middle of a generation focused not on the heavens above but on an image of it on their cell phones, more enamored of virtual than of reality. Our politics have followed suit, small-minded, broken into little self-serving pieces, "alternative facts" and "fake news" acceptable oxymorons, their way paved by the acceptance of other oxymorons such as "virtual reality." The result is the corporatization of the extraterrestrial. Instead of grand endeavors supported by and done for our people's sense of collective discovery, nobility, advancement, and inspiration, we will have just another realm for financial aggrandizement.

Almost a half century ago we sent Americans to the moon with less computer power than is sitting on my laptop. That feat was done in the name of all Americans by our government, and all Americans rejoiced, feeling a sense of collective, national pride and personal inspiration even in the middle of the extremely divisive Viet Nam War. Slowly Americans began to think small, looking inward, electing leaders who also thought small. We are now in the middle of a consumer enraptured generation focused not on the heavens above but on an image of it on the gadgets in front of their noses, more enamored of virtual than of reality. Our politics have followed suit, small-minded, broken into little self-serving pieces, "alternative facts" and "fake news" acceptable oxymorons, their way paved by the acceptance of consumerist oxymorons such as "virtual reality" and "internet security", snake oil coming not out of Washington but from California. The result is the corporatization of the extraterrestrial. Instead of grand endeavors supported by and done for our people's sense of collective discovery, nobility, advancement, and inspiration, we will have just another realm for financial aggrandizement.

Good to see that Musk is focused on sending a roadster into space while hundreds of thousands of his depositors sit idle waiting for the Model 3 cars that he promised them. He seems to expect an awful lot of accolades and money for not always keeping his promises. I hope the rocket works because, on the automotive front, the well-established major manufacturers are about to eat his lunch.

We used to think the oceans were infinite too before all the trash we threw in them starting piling up. We shouldn’t be too surprised when one day there’s a big surtax on red Tesla’s like there are now on plastic bags.

Elon, kudos... But - enough with colonizing the moon and Mars and so on... The weight/thrust ratio isn't much different from the Saturn V of 50 years ago... Getting the cost down by 10X is a game-changer - though more for putting a couple of dozen Hubble-equivalent telescopes into orbit... Or several James Webb-equivalent telescopes at the Lagrange point... You could equip those with the autonomous driving capabilities of a Tesla - and they could keep out of each other's way...

As one who lived in the Johnson Space Center area for many years, I can promise: the idea of “saving money” and “doing space more cheaply” is a recipe for heartbreak.

I imagine that Tesla shareholders won’t be so pleased with sending one theirs into space! The appropriate message to the aliens should really be “capital of $50bn kindly requested”.

Should be quite a show when it goes off, one way or another. Maybe add to the considerable cloud of space junk already engirdling the planet?

"After years of falling short of optimistic predictions, SpaceX seemed to fall into a consistent, accident-free flow of sending payloads to orbit." Except for the last super secret payload delivery it would seem.

"A Falcon 9 booster has nine of SpaceX’s Merlin engines, each putting out 190,000 pounds of thrust. The Heavy triples that to 27 engines and a total of more than 5 million pounds of thrust." Mmm ... I wish I had something like that on my Chevy Corvette. Anyhoo, I hope the space car is more representative of humankind than just monotonously drifting around for a billion years. Like revving its thrusts going past Leda or Larissa, cutting in and out of the meteor lanes, turning its azimuth indicator but veering the other way, etc.

I'm really pleased to see SpaceX's progress. I watched the Apollo 11 launch while at my summer job at JPL. I watched SpaceX's 2012 COTS 2 launch in person. The Saturn V that took us to the moon had about 2X the low earth orbit payload capacity of the Falcon Heavy. While it feels a little ironic to be rebuilding capabilities we had, but abandoned a half-century ago, I think we're doing it better this time around.

Colonizing the solar system--that really IS a laudable, and achievable human destiny. Forget 'going to the stars' unless they're self-contained biospheres that would take many generations to reach a nearby destination, even at the fastest velocities we can imagine at the cutting edge of forseeable technologies. However, in the near-term, forget about even Mars except as a dangerous vanity project, until we solve the formidable physiological problems of near-weightless spaceflight on the human body. There are only 2 ways to make it practicable: design spacecraft that rotate to create an artificial gravity, even just a part of the spacecraft, and continue research that will one day allow us to fine-tune the human genome to be able to withstand the stresses of an off-Earth existence for longer periods of time. Simply put, genetic engineering will be an absolutely necessary capability for humans to colonize the solar system in the next 500 years. We need to get past our fears about this technology and start recognizing (if not realizing) it's potential as a key ingredient for the survival of the human species in the solar system.

I think we should be super-sure of its capabilities and add one 239 - pound package of orange - tinted dreck, strapped securely into the front seat of that Tesla. If the rocket can stand that sort of stress it should be able to deal with any unnatural forces it encounters.

"But first, the Falcon Heavy has to get off the ground. That has been a long time coming, much longer than Mr. Musk originally promised." I think it's good that Mr. Musk is setting the expectations low with the Falcon Heavy launch. We have an instant-gratification society now where any setback is seen as a colossal failure and a reason to quit. But look at the Apollo missions which people remember (rightly) so fondly. Apollo 1, which was to be the first manned Apollo mission, actually had a cabin fire during a ground rehearsal test which killed astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee on Jan. 27, 1967. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 But NASA kept going, even though they did suspend manned flights for some time. On Oct. 11, 1968, they launched the successful Apollo 7 with Walter M. Schirra, Donn F. Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham from Cape Kennedy, which led to the rest of the famous Apollo missions. Setbacks - some major - are going to occur; NASA was allowed to work through them. Hopefully both SpaceX and NASA will be able to continue their important work - even through the inevitable bumps in the road.

The car-in-space idea is very Jetsons.

Littering in outer space is still littering. Just because Elon Musk thinks something would be cool doesn't mean it's worthwhile for us or the cosmos, let alone another species from another planet. This is hubris and capitalism at an all time preposterous level.

What’s the point of this? Ego trip, or just littering space with a car?

This is American entrepreneurial spirit at its best, a guy willing to spend his entire fortune to colonize Mars!

Inexpensive, fast, and reliable were never part of any launch system designed to date, so it will be quite interesting to see if SpaceX has really found the right mix of engineering and management to make that a reality. If so, we could see a new area of space exploration in which a complex array of manned and unmanned, government and private sector projects begin to provide tangible benefits to the public.

The many naysayers' assertions that Musk misses deadlines are so very besides the point. His capacity to tolerate risk in order to go directly for the largest, most worthy goals is the legitimate working model for progress and a hopeful future in many endeavors.

The real trick to meaningful space exploration is the cost of getting a kilogram of space widgets (probes, capsules, supplies, astronauts, computers, whatever) from the surface of the earth into orbit. Make that cheap enough and you'll see an explosion of human activity into space like nothing anyone is even imaging right now. NASA, with their need to satisfy dozens of stakeholders and Congresspeople, was never going to get us there. The usual suspect defense contractors with their cost-plus contracts were never going to make it happen. Thank God for disruption.