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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."
Sounds like only business issues are left then, right?
Time to offend someone
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
Speculate being the key word. If you had in fact, read the article, you'd know that the Roadster was primarly a proof-of-concept and they are gearing up production for newer cars, using the technology behind the roadster and the knowledge they gained from building it.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
They can no longer get chassis from Lotus because Lotus updated their design and Tesla isn't going to redesign and recertify such a low volume car when their resources can better be used on the S and providing engineering resources to their OEM customers. The company is not going to fold because they are no longer producing a small number of fairly low profit cars. The roadster was always meant to be a technology demonstration and engineering research platform that just happened to bring in some revenue.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Bullshit. They are halting production of the Roadster just like they planned so they can focus on Model S production: http://www.technologyblogged.com/technology-news/tesla-halting-roadster-production-focuses-on-model-s
Why would a company that's doing exactly what they said they would do be shutting down?
And not just their own cars, the Model S, either. Tesla's business plan from the beginning was to develop the drive train technology and sell it to big-brand manufacturers. The Roadster -- i.e. the development of this technology -- was the first step. We've now seen the second step with the all-electric RAV4 from Toyota, which uses a Tesla drive train.
Tesla is far from folding, my friend.
Aikon-
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.
The shuttle had the life support endurance capabilities to get into orbit around the moon. What it didn't have was sufficient fuel to do so. Even if it did, it couldn't land there. However, there was probably enough room in the cargo bay to carry a lander and the extra propellant needed for a "flags and footsteps" mission. It would mean modifications to the tanks in the Orbital Maneuvering System (The bulges on either side of the tail fin).
The shuttle does not have the endurance capabilities to get to Mars, nor could it land there if it did.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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!)
How do you get a spacex dragon to Mars orbit in the first place?
Using the (collosal) SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. I know that R'ing TFM is not fashionable here, but seriously...
Pirate Party UK
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?
"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?
PayPal only. Sorry.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
But there was a successful design, Hubble. With Webb, you've got a bunch of new technology all shoe-horned onto a single mission, if you screw up just one of them, you fail the mission. That's why the cost blew out the way it did. Why not test the flower-petal mirror trick on an up-rated Hubble-clone first? Then add the IR sensitivity to the next version. One problem per mission.
A lot of the value of NASA comes directly from them inventing new things.
And this is part of NASA's problem, the contradiction between research and operations. They do great research, so they try to shoe-horn as much as possible into every operational mission.
People often try to criticise SpaceX's achievements (vs Constellation's non-achievements) by harping on about how much NASA research SpaceX used. What they ignore is that, by definition, the same research was available to the Constellation teams. So how was SpaceX able to fly two new rockets and a capsule for around half a billion dollars, while NASA has spent... what are they up to?... around eleven billion dollars, and have nothing to show for it.
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.
No, the reason the shuttle was such a boondoggle is because they had never built a space-plane before. And they built a 130-ton-to-orbit semi-reusable space-plane launch system as their first attempt. Hence new engines, new heat shield (actually two new heat shield technologies), new landing system, totally new type of launch (side-mount). And I'm sure, a bunch of other things I don't know about. All jammed into their prototype design, with not a single part tried on a smaller, more manageable spacecraft first. And even when they succeeded (I mean, they got the pig to fly!), they didn't do a damn thing with any of those systems while the development teams were still fresh.
And 30 years later, they've learnt nothing from their mistakes.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The Falcon 9 is hardly "60 year-old technology". Interestingly, SpaceX is one of the first companies who is using Ethernet and packet switches for internal communications within the spacecraft, as there is a high-speed data bus running the full length of the rocket. Most other previous rockets usually used something like RS-232 or RS-422 and even analog control lines for internal sensors. It also saves a huge amount of weight for that "improvement" alone as it is a simple fiber optic line instead of a fat bundle of copper wire such as exists with even the current Delta IV and Atlas V. Or are you trying to tell me that high speed fiber communications technology is 60 years old too? I think it is also safe to presume that guidance computers have come a long way in 60 years as well.
There have been other advances in metallurgy as well as refinements in the propulsion technology, and perhaps the most innovative thing that SpaceX is doing is to use modern manufacturing techniques for the construction of its vehicles. Most rockets (like the Space Shuttle) are essentially hand-crafted vehicles which have more in common with the Rolls Royce automobiles. A modern assembly line using robotics and a steady production line can improve the quality several times as well as substantially reduce cost. SpaceX plans on building at least one Merlin engine per week, sometimes as many as two or three. Repeating and refining your skills as you make things can have a huge benefit as opposed to only building one or two a year.
That is just scratching the surface as there are many other "improvements" which have happened to this vehicle and I'm really not all that familiar with the "guts" of that rocket. While the superficial design is roughly the same as a V-2 rocket, there is a whole lot more going on where it certainly isn't the same technology.
He'll be the first President of Mars, I suspect.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.