The Overview Effect – William Shatner's Words After Returning from Space

Re:The Overview Effect – William Shatner's Words After Retur... by LeifCarrotson on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @03:08PM (#28856100)

Would you rather he'd sent a block of precisely-weighed concrete into space, like other dummy payloads on other booster tests? I disagree that it's worse to send a publicity stunt instead of something more...respectful?...boring and completely useless.

I do agree that there are better things than publicity stunts to do with dummy payloads. You don't need to launch a multi-million-dollar satellite, but it would be low risk to launch a low-cost payload with corner reflectors for laser identification and distance measurement, chirping radio transmitters, or sensors, clocks, or radios for telemetry.

You can construct a Cubesat for on the order of $10k, but it used to cost 10x that to launch and now costs about that much for a SpaceX rideshare to SSO. Surely you could construct something with at least a little utility to use as a dummy payload.

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Re:The Overview Effect – William Shatner's Words After Retur... by zlsa on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @04:44PM (#28857468)

I can't find a source for this info at the moment, but I believe Gwynne Shotwell saying that they'd actually approached NASA (and possibly other customers) and asked if they'd like to fly anything on the Falcon Heavy demo mission. Clearly, nobody took them up on the offer.

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