To infinity and beyond!

Elon Musk has sent his cherry Tesla Roadster on a Falcon Heavy maiden flight. If it was up to you, what would you send as a payload on that flight and where would it be going?
Mike Simmons (Founder and CEO of "Astronomers without Borders")

What would I send as a payload? Me! Driving a Tesla roadster would be good but it seems to offer little protection.

Seriously, the payload wouldn't have made any difference on the test flight. No one was going to risk a valuable scientific payload on an unproven rocket, especially when the builder says it has only a 50% chance of success. I think the proof of concept for the Falcon Heavy's ability was quite successful.

At first it seemed more than frivolous to send his car into orbit around the Sun. But after seeing the images sent back from it and looking at the attention it got I really like it. The launch is an incredible feat and this quirky way of doing it was just mind-bending. Something different in an era where rocket launches and satellites are becoming routine.


I would have loved for SpaceX to include student experiments or some payload chosen by young people. I think that would have been the most altruistic, educational and scientific choice. But if I understand the story correctly, SpaceX had asked NASA and the US Air Force if they were interested in sending a scientific payload, free of charge on the Falcon Heavy. And while I'm not sure about the timing, but I'm betting there was a delay in a response from NASA and the Air Force, and after the answer was no, that left SpaceX to choose something fairly quickly. There may not have been time to develop something like a competition for student experiments. But the live video feed of the Tesla Roadster in orbit of Earth may have been one of the most exciting, inspirational and just plain cool things that kids have seen lately in regards to space exploration, so perhaps the Tesla was the perfect choice.

Paul Carr (Space Systems engineer at NASA, podcaster, blogger, investigator)

I am amused and disappointed at all the noise over Elon Musk’s choice of a dummy payload - his own car. I thought it was very touching and completely appropriate (full disclosure, I am a Tesla shareholder).

It is impossible to tell payload provider before a demonstration launch that their satellite is not at high risk on an unproven rocket. Throughout the long process leading up to the launch, SpaceX had been managing expectations. They have a history of failing early and learning from it. They felt they had all the known unknowns under control, but in a complex system, it is the unknown unknowns that can easily cause a disaster. I have no doubt that SpaceX approached, or were approached by, a a number of entities about having their payload on the demo flight, but all had to accept the risk. It is easy (and lazy) to say that a scientific payload should have flown, but only in hindsight is this possible, and so the word “should" has to be replaced with “could”. As it is, I think Starman was a master stroke of public relations that no one will forget for a long time. The “Don’t Panic!” sign on the dashboard made it perfect for me. I believe Douglas Adams would have been delighted to see that.

If I had about $20 million sitting around idle, and had been approached by SpaceX, I would have offered an infrared telescope to be positioned at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points (probably L1, most of the way to the moon from the Earth) to look for temporary moons. These are small asteroids that are captured into the Earth-Moon system, stay for a few orbits, and then get flung back out into the solar system. At present, we discover them pretty much by luck, if int all. A more systematic survey would provide a more accurate census of these objects, and other Near Earth objects as well. Flying all the way to a Lagrange point before the injection burn might have been a strain on the rocket's batteries, but will put that in the bucket of solvable engineering problems. The relight of the upper stage after a days long cruise would be an even better demo than what they got.

My ultimate goal would be to have a squadron of probes ready to shoot out after the temporary moons, and intercept and rendezvous with them to ascertain their mineralogy and ore-bearing potential at close distance. This would be more elaborate and expensive, but the first baby step of a telescope to detect the moons might be worth risking on a demo mission.


If I had the opportunity to select the payload for the Falcon Heavy test flight, I would have to admit that the rocket would not be powerful enough. The rocket would have been loaded with an assortment of trinkets that represented all of humanity, such as music and photos from diverse cultures. Now do not get me wrong - a Telsa Roadster is pretty cool. However, a sport car does not represent humanity in a nutshell, but rather it only represented Elon Musk and a select class of citizens most of us will never hold membership in.

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