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SpaceX Dragon As Mars Science Lander?
FleaPlus writes "Besides using the SpaceX Dragon capsule to deliver supplies to the ISS this year and astronauts in following years, the company wants to use Dragon as a platform for propulsively landing science payloads on Mars and other planets. Combined with their upcoming Falcon Heavy rocket, 'a single Dragon mission could land with more payload than has been delivered to Mars cumulatively in history.' According to CEO Elon Musk, SpaceX is working with NASA's Ames Research Center on a mission design concept that could launch in as early as 5-6 years."
...The only two companies in the US worth watching today. Probably the two that will save the nation.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
In my pants.
Sounds like only business issues are left then, right?
Time to offend someone
"But because the Dragon has a propulsion-based landing system and a much more capable heatshield than the shuttle's, it can land anywhere in the solar system with a solid surface — as long as you can throw it there."
"If the shuttle's level of reliability was acceptable, we could fly astronauts this year."
Ok. Mars, how much?
Will you take a check?
Now this might actually be some good news, after all. With NASA out of the whole "space exploration" game (or at least it will be if the U.S. Congress has anything to say about it) maybe the fantasies about the private sector coming to save us all aren't all libertarian tripe. Looking at pics of the capsule from the article, it looks like they're abandoning the whole over-engineered spaceplane concept and sticking with an Apollo capsule/Soyuz style can filled with electronics. Cheap to build, probably easy to fix and refit for the next flight, and disposable if need be (you wouldn't get it back from Mars, for example). Maybe now that the Shuttle (expensive porkbarrel boondoggle that it was) is out of the picture, NASA can get back to engineering and R&D instead of propping up the same micromanaged bureaucrat-interfered ship for decades on a stretch. Assuming that Congress ever lets them do anything again, ever, of course.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Does this mean they have room for me?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
with a unmaned ship you can get away with a lot more then a maned one.
And the lack of water, food, life support, and other stuff gives you more room for cargo.
One of the things that is really interesting about this is that it can land on pretty nearly any solid surface in the solar system. So while a Mars mission is possible, so are moon landings, scientific payloads to Titan or other Saturnian/Jovian moons, Ceres, etc. Science missions would cost less because they would need to design/test less of the infrastructure for the mission and could instead focus simply on the science equipment itself.
Dragon can land with a 6,000 lb+ payload on Earth.
So with Mars much thinner atmosphere and slightly lower gravity can the dragon land the same payload? It may need a larger parachute and or carry a lighter payload.
And what did the Vikings weigh? I remember them being a bit large.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How do you get a spacex dragon to Mars orbit in the first place?
Are we expecting the Centauri to show up to give us jumpgate technology
The Council of Elders has declared with enthuisiasm our intention to obliterate the creatures from the blue planet in person.
"For to long have these pathetic monsters hidden in the safety of their hellish atmosphere, while their mechanical agents attacked our world," announced K'breel, speaker for the Council. "We shall have revenge for the unprovoked attacks of the past twenty-two years. Most of all we shall have revenge for the Life Day transmission."
When a junior intelligence officer declined to comment, K'breel had him nailed to a yeast-tree by his gelsacs for being a smartass.
(I'm no good, but I do it for the sake of tradition!)
Elon Musk FTFA:
Personally, my view is that space transport overall should be much more of a private-public partnership, and that applies to heavy lift as well.
This. Commercial spaceflight hasn't really taken off because there hasn't been a financial reason for it to. On the other hand, NASA has a massive budget that only requires a scientific, not financial, return on investment.
The advantage is competition. With NASA having massive government resources and doing its development in-house, it ends up with inefficient designs like the shuttle, since there isn't the private sector's focus on results, or at least not since the moon landing. Its no coincidence that the Apollo missions made great strides in short time: by having a set goal that NASA was being pushed towards, they were forced to innovate. Since then, however, there has been very little drive to advance spaceflight. Hence, we were still using 40+ year old, and very expensive, tech.
Once you introduce private sector development, NASA can shop around for the best deal. This means that SpaceX is competing against Russia, etc, so they are forced to keep their development costs low while maintaining high safety records. If they didn't, NASA would simply go elsewhere. This kind of competition is highly effective for developing technology. Witness what happened to Intel after AMD released the Athlon 64: massive gains in speed and technology withing just a few years. Hopefully, something similar happens here too. This shouldn't be the end of the American space program, it should be the beginning of the effective American space program.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Per TFA, the Falcon Heavy has half the payload capacity (to the Moon) of a Saturn V.
So it's a lot better than what we have now, but not as good as what we had 45 years ago. Got it.
How does the cost of one of these things compare with a Saturn V (were one to be built today), I wonder?
If there's one thing that bugs me about NASA, it's their reluctance to reuse successful designs, in favor of starting a new (unproven) platform. I know they build "on the shoulders of the men who went before", but it seems like there's a lot of NIH in their projects.
We've had 2 rovers on Mars that exceeded their design lifespan by an order of magnatude, and have provided a lot of useful science. Why not spend the small amount of money to manufacture a dozen more on the same design, and drop them onto mars? Heck, how would that same design function on the moon? Or on Europa?
Instead, a lot more money is spent on designing the "next generation" rover platform that won't be ready to launch for 8 years.
Why not build a 2nd hubble telescope while the JWST is still being designed? Why did we spend 30 years not building reusable orbital craft (aka space shuttles) when all it would take is to follow an existing blueprint? (Not to mention abandoning the Apollo/Saturn platform for manned spaceflight)
Of course, I am not a rocket scientist, and I'm not a political administrator trying to justify NASA's budget, but wouldn't it make sense to keep doing what has worked?
--Joe
Dragons traditionally don't have manes, although some are sometimes depicted with whiskers.
Same AC here. NASA is working on hydroponics. I can't find the link I remember, but there was something the size of a double-wide trailer created over 15 years ago that could support 80% of the nutrients necessary for a crew of three.
Here's detail on a recent ISS experiment for validating one type of growing technology (Lada-VPU-P3R). It looks like they've grown barley. What's next? Space beer?
Well, the summary claims it - but nowhere in the article is propulsive landing on Mars mentioned.
Not that I believe it probable. The problem with landing heavy payloads to date has been that Mars' atmosphere is too thin to land ballistically/aerodynamically, and it's gravity too high to land propulsively. I don't see offhand that the Dragon's payload is sufficient to overcome this.
I don't get it. Why mars? How much more science could you do in 6 short hops to the moon vs. 1 monster hop to mars? Then once moon trips become commonplace you start to build manufacturing facilities and build your big components there. Just haul out of this big gravity pit that is the earth the things you cannot get or build easily there like electronics, some raw materials and mostly people. Once you are building things there you don't have to worry about escaping earth's gravity and I would think things could get lots more efficient. I think that it kinda sucks that once we got there we didn't stay there.
Does anyone know if SpaceX has published a plan for how they intend to actually land the capsule on Mars?
Landing such a large mass on a planet with such a thin atmosphere is not a trivial engineering problem. There is not a hell of a lot of gas to brake against upon atmospheric entry, air bags become more complicated for such large masses, and get-ups similar to the sky-crane and retro-rockets tend to be expensive and complex. Has anyone heard SpaceX's idea on solving this particular problem?
If so, could you provide a linky?
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But the absolute goal of SpaceX is to develop the technologies to make life multiplanetary, which means being able to transport huge volumes of people and cargo to Mars.
Who said the U.S. doesn't have any vision for space anymore? What country is Mr. Musk developing his business in?
:D
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If there's one thing that bugs me about NASA, it's their reluctance to reuse successful designs, in favor of starting a new (unproven) platform.
You have a valid point but in their defense a lot of what NASA does involves things that push the frontiers of engineering and science. Often there is no successful design to work from. There is a lot of talk about the James Webb telescope in the news right now. That program pushes the boundaries of our engineering capabilities. Off the shelf isn't really an option. A lot of the value of NASA comes directly from them inventing new things. Numerous multi-billion dollar industries have come from technology developed at NASA. Part of the reason the shuttle program was such a boondoggle was specifically because it took away much of the reason for NASA to think hard about solving new problems.
IIRC the Tesla motor's version has record power to weight ratio. They used the lowest resistance (softest) copper for the windings they could.
It is very difficult to land on. Check out the landing system for the next Mars Science Laboratory NASA mission.
Musk is famous for being very keen on going to Mars, but I wonder just how detailed this plan is so far.
I have suspected for a while now that certain players in the private space industry is quietly interested in going to Mars.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.