210
Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster
(www.astronomy.com)
He’s fucking things up in space, even.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
210 points (96.9% liked)
Astronomy
4194 readers
8 users here now
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
his stupid fucking internet satellites make planning getting things into orbit real hard. also it's not even his tesla in space. he stole it from mark eberhart
And his 6,000+ starlink pieces of trash in orbit have made earth based telescopes worse. They get in the way of the shot, and the emissions are something like 10x worse than promised.
Him and that tetraethyl lead guy. Just absolute stains.
Edit: no its 32 times the noise. It's a known issue, and it's been happening since the beginning.
Nit to mention all the methane his rocket is adding to the upper atmosphere.
SpaceX rockets don't add Methane to the atmosphere. When you burn something, you're not adding that thing to the atmosphere, you're adding byproducts from the combustion, and Methane isn't one of the byproducts of any rocket fuel.
Starship uses methane as a fuel, but that's not at all the same thing. Methalox engines are one of the cleanest burning rocket fuels after Hydrolox. When burnt, methane just becomes CO2 and water vapor along with a bit of NOx (Nitrous Oxide, aka laughing gas, aka that boost you see in Fast and the Furious) as well.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are Kerolox (Kerosene, RP-1) engines. RP-1 is basically just a highly refined kerosene. When burnt, it will produce CO2, water vapor, NOx, carbon soot, carbon monoxide (which again mostly becomes CO2) and a little bit of sulfur compounds. The exhaust is nasty but it is not that different from what a normal internal combustion car produces. And even with the large amounts, it is still lower than what cars/trucks/SUVs output to get everyone in your city back and forth to work, the grocery store, and home on a daily basis.
NOx is not Nitrous Oxide and is not short for Nitrous Oxide. Nitrous Oxide is specifically N2O. NOx refers to both Nitric Oxide (NO) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), both of which are far, far more damaging to health and atmosphere than N2O. NOx emissions are the reason diesel is generally nonexistent in US passenger vehicles - not even great mpg numbers have sufficiently-low NOx emissions.
Even if it included N2O, using nomenclature with a variable like "NOx" and grouping it all together as one inert byproduct vastly underrepresents harm. Imagine if you referred to another group as "COx" but saying it's relatively inert and easily detected by way of a burning lung sensation but feeds plants so it's not all bad because Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has that effect. Carbon Monoxide (CO) is completely left out of that description and will silently kill you.
Rocket engines don't just immediately start, propellant has to be flowing through the turbo pumps before the flames start. Same at shut down. On the video you can see vapour coming out. That's either methane or oxygen. How much of either? We can't say because spacex doesn't talk much about it. Same with 'venting' which happens quite a lot as shown on the videos as well. Whether it's a little or a lot, it's definitely more than was there before launch.
And that's on a successful launch. Scott Manly talks about the last launch and shows how the methane levels were draining on the ship way faster than the oxygen levels, pointing to at least incomplete combination and probably methane puking out the back. Methane may be 'clean' when it's burnt under optimal conditions, when it's conflagrated in a RUD it's less so.
Yes, yes, "it's a drop in the bucket, it's a tiny percentage of blah blah blah" which works fine until they start launching 3 per day. Then the question of what methane (a highly potent greenhouse gas) does when it's directly added into the upper atmosphere gets answered.
The part you're not talking about is that there's no catalytic converters on rockets tough, so it's more like running a carbureted car than a modern car.
But muh rural internet is not as good as muh urban internet! So, forgiven!
How many times can a chunk of our tax dollars go toward paying private companies to not deliver rural broadband? Let's find out!
In many locations it's the difference between having Internet and not having it at all. The only issue with it is it being privately owned.
Not really here, this would have been a dummy weight either way since it was the test payload for Falcon Heavy. So *something *was going to be sent up. The Tesla specifically was a publicity stunt, but a similar weight was going into a similar orbit.
The bigger question is why they lost tracking on it in the first place to where they weren't sure what it was. This wasn't from any sort of failure, this was a planned and fully successful launch payload into a planned orbit.
Tracking doesn't necessarily have to be lost for this kind of thing to happen. The Rosetta spacecraft was accidentally given a provisional asteroid designation in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)#Deep_space_manoeuvres
Fuck Musk. But also, this is a nothingburger -- there are plenty of spent upper stages floating around the solar system.
This entire thread is filled with people that know absolutely nothing about Space but the basics modern "media" poorly conveys, but feel the need to comment and display their ignorance proudly just because they hate Musk. It's quite sad actually for an actual Astronomy community, there's worse discussion in here than reddit.
As a KSP player I can confirm this
Things would be going much better if he was behind the wheel of that car.
Can we please fine him a few billion dollars for intentionally littering in space?
Better fine the US government or NASA for all the Saturn V upper stages that are floating around up there as well. Nearly every Saturn V third stage was sent into an orbit around the sun after the Lunar injection maneuver, they're all still up there. In fact, they lose track of those and "rediscover" them all the time because. The three-body problem is not fully solvable with our current technology, and the further out you get from initial conditions the less accurate calculations become.
I mean, I'm very okay with that too. 😁
There oughtta be a sci-fi short story competition using this for a basis - what happens when aliens eventually come across this bizarre piece of junk in space?
It'd be so funny if Kessler Syndrome was started by a car accident.
Yay more space garbage. Just what we needed!
It's in orbit around the Sun.
We all are
The point is that it's nowhere near Earth to cause an issue like Kessler Syndrome, which the space junk comment is clearly referring to.
The car is space junk like every other test payload or probe we've ever sent out into space that we've lost contact with is space junk.