Not quite correct. Almost all the materials used for the car are currently outgassing. The various metals, plastics, and composites all have some amount of air or other gas trapped in them, and its escaping, greatly weakening the components.
I'd imagine everything is much more brittle and fragile than before the launch already.
Outgassing (sometimes called offgassing, particularly when in reference to indoor air quality) is the release of a gas that was dissolved, trapped, frozen or absorbed in some material. Outgassing can include sublimation and evaporation (which are phase transitions of a substance into a gas), as well as desorption, seepage from cracks or internal volumes, and gaseous products of slow chemical reactions. Boiling is generally thought of as a separate phenomenon from outgassing because it consists of a phase transition of a liquid into a vapor of the same substance.
You think the engineers designed a fully functioning falcon heavy, but couldnt do a decent hot glue job? Ye of little faith, they even remembered to glue him to the seat, so he wouldnt float around!
What!? I thought the car was in a capsule. You mean they opened up the cargo bay and just let the car float away on its journey? Seriously? That is the coolest thing ever.
Copypasta to clear up:
Its is a car mounted on a platform with cameras and some controls and sensors. It is not just a random flying car, but it is openly flying in space without a capsule!
It hasn't been up there long enough to have any real visible changes. With enough time you'll see the paint jog get bleached, but that could take decades maybe.
Region dense with highly charged particles + electronics is not a great combo, but it was shielded or redundant enough to work. Ionizing radiation is bad for organics and electronics alike, but it isn't undefeatable.
At the press conference after the launch Elon Musk said they didn't really do anything to make it spaceworthy. It's just a car, in space. Welded to a rocket and some camera mounts.
Seems to be holding up okay, but nobody really knows...
No he means putting a car into space and exposing it to space might produce an unknown event because it's never been done, they only ever put things in space with specific materials in mind.
I'm sure it's having an effect, but not one that is visible via our view of it.
It's not like a lack of atmospheric pressure would really affect the mostly solid materials that make up a car, the liquid in any LCDs would probably boil off pretty quickly, I don't know what else would really visibly change though.
The only thing a vacuum would affect would be enclosed pressurized air. I did read they let the air out of the tires and some other air controlled things. But since it's not running none of the engine or other compartments inside it would be pressurized in any way.
75
u/[deleted] Feb 07 '18
Is there a window in the cargo bay?