You are correct; I wasn’t linking "want to drive the liberals crazy” to Musk or SpaceX.
I was commenting on “that statement could apply to this [SpaceX] launch” by @ArlHtsMelissa.
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Reading comprehension problem? I never bashed the space shuttle program.
You’re the one who initially brought up cost.
Ok, maybe you didn’t bash the COST of the Space Shuttle (interesting that you brought up “reading comprehension”.
And if it wasn’t bashing, why did you bring up the COST in the Shuttle program with “$10k per pound is one tenth of what the space shuttle program cost per launch.”?
It certainly seems like a distraction from my comment about how money in the SpaceX launch could have been spent on aspirational/inspirational and “cool” science instead.
Correct, and it was brought up as “It does seem irrelevant to my point in bringing up cost, which was that the money could have been spent on COOL science.” (emphasis added)
Just stating FACT. Because SpaceX can reuse their booster rockets it saves a lot of money. I have nothing but great respect for NASA and SpaceX.
Are you jealous that SpaceX is doing a better job at 1/10 the price?
Seems to me his life’s goal is a Mars colony. He’s already developing his BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) as the workhorse for that mission.
Facts include those that are relevant and irrelevant. Facts regarding the COST of Space Shuttle launches are irrelevant to the topic of launching a Roadster as a publicity stunt.
Maybe this change from
“And bashing the Space Shuttle cost doesn’t change the nature of the stunt.”
to
“And irrelevant facts about the Space Shuttle cost doesn’t change the nature of the stunt.”
makes a difference to you, but it doesn’t change the point being made.
And your question about jealousy is strange (and irrelevant as well) given that I’ve written nothing to suggest that emotion.
OTOH, it is possible that you have a bias toward favoring SpaceX that blinds you to other views.
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I understand why he would send up a car. Several reasons. I didn’t work much directly on space electronics, but some of it was worked on, by fellow technicians, in the section of which I was Senior diagnostician. The Space Shuttle electronics was from the 1960’s. We used to show new techs the SG41 quad nand chips they used for logic circuits. It was like taking them to an electronics museum, and they would laugh and laugh.
A principle of logic circuits is theoretically you can make any desired logic circuit from nand gates if you have enough of them.
Space shuttle electronics was not practical to update because of Space Shuttle safety standards. To certify the electronics equipment as safe for human transport cost buckets of big bills for each item. And, though it would have been easy to produce modern circuitry to do the same tasks much more efficiently, the safety checks would have to be repeated, and at increased costs with inflation. It simply was not financially feasible to use newer designs solely over safety certification costs.
As production of the electronics reached its end several decades ago, NASA required the contractors to obtain a large quantity of replacement parts and put them into bonded stock, as statisticians estimated the probable number of failures of components over the lifespan of the Shuttles. As a wild guess, now that the Shuttles have been shut down, somewhere out there one can buy large quantities of obsolete SG41 chips. 
Not that I can even imagine a use for them…
Now, for those who wondered why they didn’t send up scientific equipment, y’all need to think that through.
A Tesla costs around $35 a pound; you simply tell the boss how many you want.
Scientific equipment certified for space use probably runs into the thousands of dollars a pound, if not even more. Then, you need to add data link capability to send the data back, and atomic or solar generators to power it. Add a large number of people and more equipment on the ground and the facilities to process and store the data, and the total cost would be in the tens of millions – or more.
And, with the current knowledge level of NASA, what data can they get to justify all that expense?
It is correct that he needed a brick, and a Tesla car is a cheap enough brick.
Imagine with me what the look on Captain Kirk’s face will be like, some day, when he encounters that Tesla. Hahaha.
It occurs to me that discussions about the pluses and minuses of the Roadster as payload might be part of the publicity stunt, and if so, it makes no sense for me to contribute to them any further.
SpaceX has already done it much cheaper than NASA or DoD could, and they had good reason to believe they could. When the government recognized how far development had progressed, they spent money on the Falcon series. A lot of the cost difference is that the older organizations have a huge number of requirements and big organization to track them. Remember the $10,000 (or whatever it was) toilet? The toilet didn’t actually cost that much, it was all the testing required to meet the MIL-SPECs tat were so costly.
I doubt it
You can be sure there are plenty of liberals who are excited about their Tesla automobiles
I suspect Elon Musk wouldn’t consciously do anything, which might alienate his customers. He may be many things, but I don’t think he makes bad business decisions
Didn’t drive me crazy. Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio 
Hmm, or if the Tesla and Voyager meet up would they argues about who the ‘creator’ was and how would James Tiberius Kirk solve that?
Again…you’re the one who brought up cost. Gee…what’s the problem.
So it’s a publicity stunt…It’s a GREAT publicity stunt. Elon Musk has not gotten a lot of people talking about it and it even made first page news in some papers. Without the Tesla being in the rocket it might have been just ho-um news. Getting people excited about space and science is NOT a bad thing.
That’s your opinion.
That’s funny…since Conservatives (specifically Christian Conservatives) think any science exploration is a waste of tax payers money since all science is spelled out clearly in the Bible.
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i watched a bit of star trek:first contact yesterday. ryker said there are 50million people living on the moon in the future. in caves? there is an atmosphere in the future? science is awesome. on tv
You seal the cave you can create your own atmosphere inside the cave. Already been done here on earth.
You’re recycling your comments.
So as I already noted, discussions about the pluses and minuses of the Roadster as payload might be part of the publicity stunt (which you’ve admitted), and if so, it makes no sense for me to contribute to them any further.
(And if you are out to propagate the stunt, you’ll probably respond to this.)
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the Sun - in fact, our whole solar system - orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr.
As schoolchildren, we learn that the earth is moving about our sun in a very nearly circular orbit. It covers this route at a speed of nearly 30 kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour.
the Moon orbits Earth at a speed of 2,288 miles per hour (3,683 kilometers per hour). During this time it travels a distance of 1,423,000 miles (2,290,000 kilometers
That’s right I admitted to it…so what? Why does it bother you so much that it’s a publicity stunt. They either had to put concrete blocks in the capsule or the Tesla…I’d choose the Tesla too. It’s not tax payers money. It’s a private company. The stunt was designed to get people interested in the space program and science. I guess you have a problem with that.
John Glenn hitting a golf ball on the moon wasn’t a publicity stunt? It probably cost NASA more money to bring the golf club and ball to the moon then it did SpaceX to launch a Tesla into space.
As a follow-on, one of the ways under study to create a Moon or Mars habitat is to fuse the soil together to create an impermeable facility for the visitors to live in.