Man believes Earth is flat tries to prove it

[zetreque]

A flat-Earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn’t even ignite.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/06/a-flat-earther-finally-tried-to-fly-away-his-rocket-didnt-even-ignite/?utm_term=.35a467b09f62

[toucana]

♫ ♫ This is ground control to Major Tom, can you hear me Major Tom ? ♫ ♫

Never mind. Another eccentric enthusiast did manage to get their rocket aloft the other day. Elon Musk the head of SpaceX fired his trusty old red colour Tesla Roadster into orbit atop of the new Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy dressed in a spacesuit at the wheel.

The plan was to carry out a sequence of burns to break earth orbit and place the Tesla in a parking orbit around the general vicinity of Mars. Unfortunately, the latest orbital correction went slightly pear-shaped, and the dummy is now on its way to the asteroid belt and Jupiter instead.

Rather appropriately the dummy is wearing headphones and listening to a recording of 'Space Oddity' by David Bowie.

You can follow the live camera feeds from the Tesla on Elon Musk's Twitter feed
https://www.indy100.com/article/elon-musk-flat-earth-society-spacex-falcon-heavy-twitter-conspiracy-theory-david-bowie-8198331?utm_source=indy&utm_medium=top5&utm_campaign=i100

p.s. the blue round-shaped thing in the background is planet earth.

[SciameriKen]

Am I understanding this correctly? Musk just launched a car with a dummy in it into space?

And we thought the Humanity star was a horrible idea:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/ ... story.html

[toucana]

The first test of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy composite rocket was deemed to be a high-risk launch.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/spacex-launch-tesla-roadster-car-mars-elon-musk-asteroid-orbit-trajectory-missed-a8199186.html

Elon Musk himself believed there was barely a 50% chance of anything other than a spectacular fireball on the launchpad once the ignition button was pressed. Given those odds, no-one wanted to risk a payload of any real value on the maiden flight, so Musk opted for a token joke one instead

[zetreque]

I am not a fan of Musk one bit. I have been following him for the past 20 years. He is just another self-indulgent opportunist capitalist and doesn't deserve all of the environmentalism credit people give him.

[TheVat]

Am I understanding this correctly? Musk just launched a car with a dummy in it into space?

And we thought the Humanity star was a horrible idea:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/ ... story.html

That's that stupid orbiting disco ball? Yeah that was silly.

Musk seems to have that flair for self-promotion that attracts journalists like moths to a floodlight. Like Edison, he is quite skilled at taking other people's ideas and packaging them. I'd bet few people can tell you who the original founders of Tesla were. Two guys, neither of them are Musk.

[TheVat]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... usk-spacex

[toucana]

On the general subject of flying cars, did you see this item about the EHANG 184 AAV ?

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/08/technology/ehang-self-flying-drone/index.html

The EHANG corporation based in Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China first demonstrated this technology abroad at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2016. It has been developed some way since then, and is now a fully-fledged people carrying autonomous flying drone system.

Hats off to the intrepid souls who first test-flew it in a typhoon, at high altitude, and at night (as the video shows). The flying taxis of Blade Runner and The Fifth Dimension may be closer than we imagine.

[someguy1]

I am not a fan of Musk one bit. I have been following him for the past 20 years. He is just another self-indulgent opportunist capitalist and doesn't deserve all of the environmentalism credit people give him.

Agreed. But he's no capitalist. He's a crony capitalist. His products and companies are heavily subsidized by the government. Socialized losses, privatized profits. He's exactly what's wrong with our system.

[zetreque]

I am not a fan of Musk one bit. I have been following him for the past 20 years. He is just another self-indulgent opportunist capitalist and doesn't deserve all of the environmentalism credit people give him.

Agreed. But he's no capitalist. He's a crony capitalist. His products and companies are heavily subsidized by the government. Socialized losses, privatized profits. He's exactly what's wrong with our system.

He is raping Nevada taking full advantage of the state for his gigafactory and lithium. What does the state get in return? More population growth with an already stressed water supply in the desert, more gridlock on the roads, and less tax revenue to support those people (no state tax and nearly zilch tax for corporations that abuse the public land resources).

Same old boom bust cycle. Perhaps more Nevada ghost towns in the future. Lessons from the past litter the desert landscape.

PS: You don't save Earth by some personal quest to set foot on Mars.

[JMP1958]

Falcon_Tesla.png

Never mind. Another eccentric enthusiast did manage to get their rocket aloft the other day. Elon Musk the head of SpaceX fired his trusty old red colour Tesla Roadster into orbit atop of the new Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy dressed in a spacesuit at the wheel.

The plan was to carry out a sequence of burns to break earth orbit and place the Tesla in a parking orbit around the general vicinity of Mars. Unfortunately, the latest orbital correction went slightly pear-shaped, and the dummy is now on its way to the asteroid belt and Jupiter instead.

Since the Tesla doesn't have a means of changing its velocity and is on a purely ballistic trajectory, it would have never achieved a parking orbit. ( a parking orbit is a temporary orbit from which a future trajectory is to be launched.) The original plan was to put it into an orbit which would have a aphelion at Mars orbit distance. It got more of a boost than expected which pushed that aphelion out to the asteroid belt. Barring any close enough encounters with other solar system bodies, it will return to to Earth orbit distance in ~2.4 years. (of course Earth won't be at the same point of its orbit at the time, but after some number of orbits we might pass each other close enough to alter its trajectory into a new orbit. )

[SciameriKen]

The first test of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy composite rocket was deemed to be a high-risk launch.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/spacex-launch-tesla-roadster-car-mars-elon-musk-asteroid-orbit-trajectory-missed-a8199186.html

Elon Musk himself believed there was barely a 50% chance of anything other than a spectacular fireball on the launchpad once the ignition button was pressed. Given those odds, no-one wanted to risk a payload of any real value on the maiden flight, so Musk opted for a token joke one instead

I would guess there is probably a scientific endeavor where the risk/benefit/cost threshold could have been achieved. This is just Musk advertising himself - and in my opinion, there should be regulations against space littering.

[mitchellmckain]

On the general subject of flying cars, did you see this item about the EHANG 184 AAV ?


The EHANG corporation based in Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China first demonstrated this technology abroad at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2016. It has been developed some way since then, and is now a fully-fledged people carrying autonomous flying drone system.

What impressed me about this was its rather small size.

[zetreque]

https://www.outerplaces.com/science/ite ... rth-survey

According to the poll, which took responses from 8,215 people, around 2 percent of Americans believe the Earth is flat.

On top of that, 5 percent of those surveyed have always thought the world was round, but now have doubts.

These numbers alone are pretty eye-opening, but even more remarkable is the correlation between those who believe that the Earth is flat and religion: around 52 percent of self-proclaimed flat Earthers say they are "very religious."

This makes sense, according to psychologist Michael Wood: according to him, many flat Earth YouTubers and videos explicitly say that "they find it more appalling to believe in the universe as a huge, uncaring place, and that it seems more reasonable to imagine Earth was made for humans like a perfect snow globe."

For anyone who graduated high school, the religious anxiety over the flatness or roundness of Earth seems to echo what happened when Galileo challenged the geocentric model of the solar system back in the 1600s—faced with evidence that the Earth wasn't the literal and symbolic center of creation, the Catholic Church realized that the information might cause a crisis of faith and tried to suppress it. It seems that the flat Earth movement represents a lot of those old fears, just dressed in new clothes.