this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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The ballast could just as easily have been university student design team projects and he would have been doing a ton of good for the world, but instead he decided to waste all that fuel and a whole car for publicity. "Efficiency".
On the first flight of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket, a university satellite was the payload. Not only did the launch fail in just the first few seconds, but the payload crashed back. Landing in the shipping container it arrived in. First launches of rockets do not have good track records. Risking a silly car was arguably more fun than the equally useless "mass simulators" used on most first launches. If it were my satellite, I would not have wanted it on the first Falcon Heavy launch.
To give an otherwise unfunded project the chance to go to space, however slim, is worth far more than a tesla roadster with an astronaut mannequin, and costs far less. What was their satellite design going to do on earth?
There isn't any way we could find a million high school students to donate experiments or golden records. What we need is to use government investment to shoot shameless product placement for my other company into space and live stream pictures of it.
What government investment are you talking about? SpaceX paid for the first flight with their own cash. Launch contracts for Falcon Heavy were for subsequent flights. Heck, SpaceX got in trouble from the US government for the live stream of pictures.