Nasa slams Elon Musk’s SpaceX for launching a Tesla car into the heavens

Transparent? Maybe not so much as we thought. I thought NASA was fully on board with SpaceX, but the complaints are coming in now. Why not before why are they saying it now, really bad timing. It seems like NASA is vying to own the Super Space Highway and push competitors out. Remember, Musk did this not NASA first time in history with few expenses. NASA has literally wasted billions and no where near achieved this at the financial cost SpaceX has.

It was hailed as the future of space exploration. But Nasa has taken a dig at Elon Musk for sending a Tesla Roadster into the heavens during the test of the world’s most powerful rocket. Lisa Pratt, Nasa’s planetary protection officer, is normally concerned with thinking about how to protect Earth from threats like asteroids and aliens.

Space pollution is already a huge issue. Orbiting debris poses a risk to satellites and manned crafts when they are orbiting Earth.Now she’s called for ‘reasonable protocols and processes’ to be put in place to govern private space missions like Musk’s recent launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying a Tesla sports cars, stating that, ‘We have to figure out how to work closely, how to move forward in a collaborative posture so we don’t have another red Roadster up there in orbit.’

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Shes not wrong..

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Shes not wrong..

She might not be right either!

Since when has NASA become the owner and decider of whatever goes on out of our planets atmosphere?

"scratches head"

Warmest respects

Lags

NASA is a typical government money pit. They promise all kinds of things and seem to deliver very little. Their entire mission for the last however many decades has been low earth orbit and unmanned rovers and probes. How is the public supposed to get excited about that?

The human race wants to see people on Mars. It's that damn simple. They don't care about studying soil samples and looking for fossils and looking for evidence of water in the ancient past. If you want the average person to think of Mars (or any planet) as an actual PLACE, you have to send human beings to that place and bring back lots of pictures and video.

If you want to inspire people, you do something that's unbelievable. Brainy stuff like working on the space telescope isn't going to cut it for people who stare at screens with their mouths open when they're not shuffling papers at the office. Nobody cares what the dust on Mars is made of. Everyone wants to see a person walk on Mars. And hey. Bonus points if the soil on Mars eats the person on live TV.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Shes not wrong..

I' guessing that NASA are pissed that they lost the opportunity to get a space probe launched for free. Consider the weight of the car chassis alone and the fact that the system there has a HD video stream.
What could they have done with those constraints?

a reply to: BotheLumberJack

Now after they know it worked they think of a better use? It's not like he didn't give the world a long time between announcement and lift off.
Weak move NASA...

Nobody expected the rockets to work, it was around, a 50/50 chance of it happening. My guess is that NASA didn't think it would work at all, so didn't say much about it. Now they're up in arms over space junk? It's laughable when you consider most of it's probably theirs. Not to mention they're also telling us now that Elon Musks Tesla Car will 'Contaminate' Mars.

a reply to: Lagomorphe

Im not saying they own space. Im saying orbitary debris is a risk to life safety, and sales gimmicks that add to it increase that risk.

Im sure that NASA being shown up hurt their ego. But what she said is still correct...we need to have less salesmanship putting debris in orbit.

a reply to: Peeple

Yeah and Millions more watched online, making it the second biggest live stream in YouTube history.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: Lagomorphe

Im not saying they own space. Im saying orbitary debris is a risk to life safety, and sales gimmicks that add to it increase that risk.

Im sure that NASA being shown up hurt their ego. But what she said is still correct...we need to have less salesmanship putting debris in orbit.

Totally agrred mate, I understood what you meant.

I also personally think that GVT entities, no matter what country they come from should also start cleaning up the gunk that they have left behind up there.

Kindest respects

Lags

I was with one today.

Didn't sound very solid when they closed the doors.

Sounded like a piece of crap.

But it was very cool to do, by Musk.

It's going to Mars, right?

So it won't be hanging around for long., besides what's 1 more POS running around up there anyway?

originally posted by: Lagomorphe

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: Lagomorphe

Im not saying they own space. Im saying orbitary debris is a risk to life safety, and sales gimmicks that add to it increase that risk.

Im sure that NASA being shown up hurt their ego. But what she said is still correct...we need to have less salesmanship putting debris in orbit.

Totally agrred mate, I understood what you meant.

I also personally think that GVT entities, no matter what country they come from should also start cleaning up the gunk that they have left behind up there.

Kindest respects

Lags

No wonder UFO's crash!

They hit that # coming out of warp.

IIRC, the tesla is on a trajectory that has it headed towards mars, but will not quite make orbit or has taken a turn into deep space way off course. Either way how is the car going to cause a debris problem? It's not in LEO, and any debris from releasing the payload would be the same if not less than the average launch of any rocket into space.

a reply to: BotheLumberJack

I am torn on this issue.

While I agree that launching his Tesla Roadster, with its faux passenger and admittedly amusing sci-fi comedy references, was not a very responsible thing to do, I have to wonder how NASA, whose astronauts regularly drop tools and other detritus in space, whose space vehicles wasted masses of materials over the years, many of which are part of the orbital debris cloud around our world, an organisation which launched a very decent chunk of the man made, defunct crap that orbits our world, can have a pop at a man whose company operates a launch system which is one of the least wasteful ever devised, and contributes much less during normal operation, to that debris cloud, than ANY NASA mission ever has.

So yes, its wasteful to throw that car into orbit, and presents a needless threat to other space traffic. On the other hand, NASA are in no position to comment on that. Its precisely as inexplicably hypocritical, as BP complaining that a smaller outfit had caused the spillage of a single litre of oil.

NASA, the military and all the other space agencies (Russian, ESA, China, etc) are responsible for over 99% of the debris that are in orbit about the Earth right now. Not SpaceX or other private agencies.

This is a no brainer as it's been NASA and the other official agencies that have been putting debris up there for over 50 years.

The actual problem is debris in Earth orbit. Not things flying through the solar system. Space is BIG (something these NASA people have seemed to of forgotten), and is why we can send things literally through the asteroid belt with no issues.

The Tesla is not in Earth orbit, it's on its way towards Mars, but is not in a impact or orbital injection path, so it will in no way "contaminate" Mars.

Space X just pulled one of the greatest engineers feat of all time, I guess someone is jealous.

hmm an tesla ore an brick of concrete...wats the differance on space junk ??????

who is the big pelutter in space .....guess nasa is !

This to me is just funny........Nasa is a bigger joke than I ever gave them credit for...... the people who have lofted 1000s of pieces of trash into orbit..... are chastising a guy for shooting one piece of garbage that isnt going to be circling the globe slamming into things.

If I got this whole science thing right...... the Tesla has gravity, things will bump into it and stick..... giving it more mass and more gravity...... which in turn will make more things bump into it and stick...... and over time this Tesla automobile will become Planet Tesla.... How could building a planet be bad

The word 'slam' is very much a mass media spin on the story. The original source of the story is much more circumspect:

spacenews.com...

Nowhere does it say "This shouldn't have happened".

What they are saying is that there is a lot of taxpayer money being spent (and not just US money, but other countries' as well), so anyone lobbing up a load of junk into orbit needs to check whether that is going to cause a problem for other people. National space agencies are governed by tight rules about what they can do out there to try and protect what are (until proven otherwise) pristine environments in the solar system. Private agencies can do what they like, and what she is suggesting (rightly) is that they need to collaborate to make sure they don't screw up someone else's expensive research project.

The NASA spokesperson is more concerned with the proliferation of cubesats in orbit. TESLA's roadster may be in Earth orbit, but it will be a looooooong time before we see it in our sky again.

No-one is saying "you can't do that", just "can you check things first?".

a reply to: BotheLumberJack

What we the people need are things that will improve our way of life and species.

-How about cheaper travel to LEO
- Mining asteroids, there are sssooo many around our planet that are rich in materials, ive been reading this book called “Soonish” that describes I of of thousands of asteroids that orbit us that has more ... I think iron?.. than the entire earth. That just one!
-better space facilities, ability to live self sufficiently in space for upwards of years.
- solar energy collection
-ways to terraform earth in case of an event
-and obviously, space exploration, personally, at this point, I think should be last, because the other things mentioned all go towards exploration.