SpaceX's top secret payload

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20101209

by rglovejoy • 16 years ago

65 22 16 years ago

ugh4• 16 years ago

For those, like me, who don’t get it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3KBuQHHKx0 (I still don’t really get it, though.)

nhebb• 16 years ago

I didn't get it either, but someone explained in it the youtube comments:

The cheese shop proprietor symbolizesNASA. "You do have some cheese, do you?" "Certainly, sir, it's a cheese shop."

iwr• 16 years ago

All they missed was a can of spam.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

So uh, how much did including that wheel of cheese there cost?

EDIT: Why the downvotes? I can't imagine sending 2-3 kilos to space is cheap.

ugh4• 16 years ago

Most likely next to nothing. This was a test flight, they were probably happy for anyone paying them something for payload. (Two CubeSats were on board.) The important thing was bringing the capsule into orbit and back, that’s what will secure SpaceX continued support from Nasa.

Consider: While this second flight of the Falcon 9 rocket was a success like the first one, the first three flights of their smaller Falcon 1 rocket were failures. You don’t want to put expensive payloads on a rocket that flies for the second time.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

Oh, you mean they included payload for testing, so they would have put something on there anyway? That makes sense...

storborg• 16 years ago

I bet they could ebay that cheese for hundreds of dollars per ounce.

m_myers• 16 years ago

Not just aged, but space-aged!

crgwbr• 16 years ago

The rule of thumb I've always heard was sending thing to orbit cost $10,000 per pound. Not sure how true that is with SpaceX though

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Nominal price per pound to LEO for the Falcon 9 is $2,200, or about $800 per pound for the Falcon 9 heavy.

pjscott• 16 years ago

What matters here is the marginal cost of sending cheese rather than some other mass to simulate a payload.

Bud• 16 years ago

I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't get any science out of this. If you're going to send cheese to space, you should hire some food writers to eat it, compare it to non-space cheese, see if there were any salutary effects, etc.

electromagnetic• 16 years ago

No, you start a brand of 'Space' cheeses, and then when transit to and from the moon becomes regular you expand to a line of 'Moon' cheeses.

roedog• 16 years ago

It's not just ballast, or ebay fodder. I see two symbolic meanings of the cheese related to SpaceX's asprirations: Cheese is food, which symbolizes the ISS resupply mission. And the cheese wheel symbolizes the moon, where they also want to go.

Smithi• 16 years ago

I heard it was a low-tech test of their heat shield performance. That's why the joke works - they had to see how runny it was.

ck2• 16 years ago

Just imagine if they had to do an emergency abort and blowup the capsule in midflight.

There would be a mysterious burning cheese smell across the country :D

SpaceX's top secret payload

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