One small Tesla for fun, thousands of giant satellites to follow!
This weekend, the next launch...
SpaceX is launching its broadband satellites into orbit this weekendFollowing the success of its Falcon Heavy launch, SpaceX is gearing up for its next mission: sending satellites into orbit so they can beam down internet access to earth.
The company isn’t making a lot of noise about it just now, but from this letter it sent to the Federal Communications Commission last week, and a license that the agency granted the Elon Musk-fronted firm last November, it’s clear that the Falcon 9 rocket that will take off on Saturday will carry two Starlink satellites alongside Mexico’s Paz mission payload.
FULL: [
link to thenextweb.com (secure)]
Now, get this!
"The company’s vice president of satellite government affairs, Patricia Cooper, said that SpaceX plans to launch 4,425 satellites in 83 orbital planes to provide connectivity" Read full:
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link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
4,425 additional satellites is a lot!
Pretty amazing. And smart. satellite connectivity will, or should be, awesome. Anywhere, connected. What is brilliant, is this will all be in place by 2019! And this will all help fund their missions to Mars. Which I think will be sooner then we all realise.
Pretty amazing. Even if that Tesla in space is odd-ball.
Just CGI.
The car, I'll agree, could be. I mean it was so awesome looking, [
link to www.youtube.com (secure)] that it must be fake!
But these satellites are the real deal. Thousands of them. Forget 5G, go SpaceX!
It's been tracked by a multitude of observers, myself included.
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link to projectpluto.com (secure)]
From the geocentric orbital elements:
Orbital elements (geocentric): 2018-017A
Perigee 2018 Feb 7.107618 +/- 5.34e-5 TT = 2:34:58 (JD 2458156.607618)
Epoch 2018 Feb 8.0 TT = JDT 2458157.5 Gray
q 7194.62795 +/- 0.828 (J2000 equator)
H 25.4 G 0.15
Peri. 144.38401 +/- 0.0032
Node 288.26796 +/- 0.00047
e 1.2156565 +/- 4.55e-5
Incl. 28.79279 +/- 0.00056269 of 277 observations 2018 Feb. 8-13; mean residual 0".358
First off, in bold at the top, the perigee date and time indicates it was closest to earth at about 9:35 pm eastern time on the 6th of February, about 6 hours after the Tesla was launched, right when the final burn to eject it from earth orbit was supposed to be occurring. See Elon's tweet from 1:28 PM pacific time on launch day (4:28 PM eastern, 5 hours prior to 9:30 pm when the final burn took place):
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link to twitter.com (secure)]
Secondly, also in bold near the bottom, the geocentric inclination is about 28 degrees, which by a shocking coincidence just happens to be the latitude of Florida where it launched from. That's not a coincidence though; they launched it from Florida with a heading of about 90 degrees due east, so it should have had an inclination roughly equal to the latitude of the launch site.
It's the Tesla and Second Stage. The launch was not faked, and the second stage really did blast itself out of earth orbit when and where they said it did.
