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SpaceX Wants To Go To Mars — and Has a Plan To Get There
mknewman writes with an article at NASA SpaceFlight which lays out the details of a plan from SpaceX to send a craft to Mars, using an in-development engine ("Raptor") along with the company's Super Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle. "Additionally, Mr. Musk also introduced the mysterious MCT project, which he later revealed to be an acronym for Mars Colonial Transport. This system would be capable of transporting 100 colonists at a time to Mars, and would be fully reusable. Article is technically dense but he does seem to follow through on his promises!"
This is an endeavor that's been on Elon Musk's mind for a while.
I'm wondering if the Mars One project hasn't had a more complex working relationship than previously thought. For all we know, Mars One could just be a separatist marketing arm of Elon Musk.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Elon Musk = D.D. Harriman, only with bigger dreams.
And not a fictional character.
It's about time America started acting like America again.
SpaceX, more than any other of the "private" space companies, has shown a compentencey for building rockets.
My Ass Is Blue, or whatever the pipe dream that Jeff Bezos is dumping money into, is not a player, not just for Mars, but for any real space flight.
Orbital Sciences and SpaceX are the real players.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
(in this case that humans can live for long periods beyond everything that we take for granted on Earth).
Are you sure that's delusional? Incredibly difficult, sure I'll grant you that. Not going to happen this decade, certainly. We'd need at least two successful Biosphere2 experiments before that will happen, and that's going to take a long time to test.
But completely delusional, would you really go that far? Because to me it seems like something possible, at least. Especially if you can get regular shipments from earth for a while.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why is putting humans into a forbidding, empty, hostile radiation-blasted hell so important?
It's just you.
Why is putting humans into a forbidding, empty, hostile radiation-blasted hell so important?
Because it's there.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Glad that yoy liked it. That engine is an enabler. Methane/oxygen works incredibly well in gas-gas cycle. It's unbeatable for that.
What I can tell is that Elon is serious in his desires. But you have to understand that the reason for that is that he has the vision and he's actually doing an ambitious but realistic plan. Next week flight will have legs on the first stage. And they'll try to pin point land it on the sea. If they do, the guys at the Cape with the big red button might let them try to land it in US soild next. But if not, that's still the cheapest rocket in its category in the world. Their modus operandi is realistic and bold. We'd better follow him because we might be watching history in the making.
A new plane doesn't make a new engine possible. A new engine makes a new plane possible.
It's great that there Elon Musk is pushing out gains in performance, reusability and most importantly cost in chemical engine design! Kudos to him (and his company).
Of course for the real exploration of the solar system to begin, we'll need nuclear (fusion!) or other such unrealized technologies. Still it's a good start!
Is anyone making sense of this? I know what all the terms are but the facts are more or less jumbled up together in ways that don't lend themselves to meaningful comparison.
Groovy ... but before I care, SpaceX needs to first have humans in space.
Then I'll give a quid about their plans for space travel.
I mean, if they haven't done a manned space flight to outside the atmosphere, it is far-fetched to be running before you can walk or even stand.
The end.
When Kennedy made his famous "We choose to go to the moon" speech, the USA had exactly 1 successful manned spaceflight - that being Alan Shepard's 15-minute suborbital hop. SpaceX has multiple successful launches, and are working on a manned version of their Dragon spacecraft.
What Musk is doing is pointing to a finish line that will take many years to accomplish. There will likely be setbacks along the way, but like Kennedy he's setting a grand vision -- hopefully I'll see that vision realized in my lifetime.
Because while this pretty blue marble we live on is mostly always habitable, there are points in its history when mass extinction events wipe out the majority of the occupants and cause everyone to start over. Sometimes inhabitants (like us) cause our own mass extinction events (interesting fact, we're killing off enough species and messing the planet up enough that we are in a period of mass extinction).
So, for survivability of our species, we really should start expanding beyond our planet (and our solar system).
And, since we don't actually know when the next mass extinction will happen, the sooner we get off this rock the better.
Because there's not enough room here.
Bullshit. If it weren't for human greed, this planet could easily support a population TWICE what it is today.
There's plenty of physical space on the planet to house everyone with plenty of space so that people aren't stacked like sardines.
Also, shipping people off to another planet to build dinky little concrete bunkers as "outposts" is no solution either.
We need the technology to actually turn Mars into a truly habitable, usable world. Even if the surface is a wasteland.
The big bullet points are this.
1: Sending people to Mars isn't a huge deal. We could do it today if we wanted.
2: Sending the equipment and supplies necessary to set up a sustainable colony is, at this point, VASTLY prohibitive.
3: In addition you have the same problems for transporting the fuel and supplies necessary for a full RETURN TRIP as well in case of disaster. Whatever the bright eyed suicide wannabes think, we shouldn't be sending people to Mars with "death" being the only way off the planet.
In short, it might be better to build a colony satellite in Mars orbit first. This way you can shuttle people to and from the planet, as well as set up as a resupply depot without the massive physical hurdles of precision landing fragile gear and supplies on-planet. So, a couple of closely spaced (pun unintentional) two-way missions with the hulls for the beginnings of a space station. And more modules can be brought in with future missions.
Continue this way until it's we have a safety net to build a sizeable facility on-planet.
Once the on-planet facility is built and vetted, move a portion of the supplies on-planet.
Slower, but much safer in the long run than just shooting people out to the planet to die.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
And if external events are of concern to you, note that even at the height of those events, the Earth was more habitable than anywhere else. Even as the asteroids rained down, even as dust plumed into the stratosphere and temperatures first rose, then plunged, the earth remain more habitable than any place that is "not-earth". If you are concerned for the survival of the species, you should be urging us to stay.
We will see a spike in human evolution once we have children on Mars too. Should prove interesting, less gravity, different radiation levels, different food, even different bacteria. Taller, skinner, different skin color...each new generation will be further from the "Baseline" until eventually it becomes it's own species, unable to reproduce with Earthers.
You know, if you're going to talk about the explosion of 1 (out of 9) rockets on one launch, you really should also mention the fact that they were able to complete the primary mission anyhow... they lost one nozzle, it shut down automatically, the fuel was diverted to the other nozzles, and they burned a little longer. They successfully rendezvoused with the ISS anyhow, despite a moderately explosive engine failure during launch. Let that sink in for a moment. Many rockets wouldn't even have been able to reach orbit in the case of a nozzle simply shutting down, much less blowing up.
In fairness to your complaint, though, the secondary goal of the mission was not attempted. SpaceX said they could give 95% assurance that the satellite would reach its safe orbit (not putting the ISS at risk), but NASA required over 99% assurance. Due to the extra fuel they'd had to burn, this could not be guaranteed. Still, it was highly likely they could have pulled it off, and likely would have tried under different circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
TWICE, eh? Look up the doubling time on world population. Hell, I'll do it for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
The short version is, given enough resources, the human population can now double more than once just in a single lifetime. We expect to hit a peak at around 2025 - that's barely over a decade away, now - but if we instead did away with that "human greed" you claim would allow supporting twice as many people, that would give a reprieve of somewhere between 20 years (assuming the historical trend of "each doubling takes half the time of the one before" holds) to possibly as much as 50 years (the estimate for the time to get from half the predicted 2025 pop to 2025). Then we're full up, again.
Aside from your 3rd point, which is frankly stupid (we've been sending people into space without an escape option for half a century now even though recovery from low earth orbit isn't nearly as hard, and yeah, sometimes they died...) the rest of what you say is probably true enough, or at least worth considering. But the argument that we could double the Earth's carrying capacity, as though that would grant more than a few decades reprieve, is bogus. We need a better option.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Besides, colonisation of planets requires people reproducing there, as a result their descendanta being unable to live on Earrh. Sending people by rocket is too expensive to be used for population export.
Yes, because I've researched:
(a) how difficult it is for humans to work in space suits, and
It's certanly more difficult than working in regular clothes without a breathing apparatus. You won't find anyone arguing that it isn't. That's not the same as impossible. Also, remember that working in a spacesuit in freefall isn't going to be the same thing as working in a spacesuit on a planet with gravity that's on the same order of magnitude as Earth gravity. Restrictive yes, but better spacesuit designs and better tools for compensating for the limited mobility can help with that.
(b) how much the human body does not like ionizing radiation, and
It doesn't, but it's not much worse on the surface of Mars than on the ISS. Unlike on the ISS, there's the option of being covered by large amounts of shielding most of the time, whether you're indoors in a shelter or driving around in a vehicle.
(c) how fucking cold it is on Mars.
That's just silly. It can get very cold on Mars at the poles and in winter. Most of the time, at moderate latitudes, temperatures on Mars are within typical Earth ranges. Since no-one will be outside without an insulated spacesuit, that shouldn't be a problem. Not to mention the fact that we're talking about an atmosphere 1% as thick as the atmosphere of Earth. So, even if the temperature is -150 degrees celcius, the actual amount of heat that the air can absorb is far, far less than -150 degrees celcius air on Earth. There's a reason that a vacuum flask can keep hot liquids hot or cold liquids cold for extended periods of time. There are still convection currents of course, but, once again, you would be in an insulated space suit.
Who builds those biospheres? Lots of people with lots of trucks and cranes. Trucks and cranes... just don't run on Mars. No oxygen.
Uhhh... Yeah. Because Mars colonists would totatally just buy regular trucks and cranes from some local vendor, fly them to Mars, then scratch their heads when the motors won't start. Or, maybe instead of something that idiotic, they could actually use something that works on Mars? There's electrically powered equipment powered via umbilicals to a power plant, batteries, maybe even RTGs. Alternately, they actually could use construction equipment off the lot powered by locally generated methane and oxygen (generated using the sabatier reaction and electrolysis, respectively). The oxygen tank would need to be four times as big as the fuel tank and fed through a regulator into a modified air intake. It might need a modified radiator, modified logic on the engine computer, maybe a regulator on the exhaust itself, but otherwise wouldn't need much modification.
Where do they build them? In Arizona. Nice, warm, sunny, near-to-civilization Arizona.
Not only build it in deep, frozen Antarctica, but have it succeed in deep, frozen Antarctica and then I'll be relatively impressed.
Mars is always sunny and, in any location we might colonize early, there's never any precipitation. Antarctica, not so much. Frankly, Arizona seems closer to the environment of Mars than Antarctica. Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
But still it won't protect people from radiation.
What, you say? Live in caves?
Digging caves is hard. It takes lots and lots of heavy machinery. Which must be transported to Mars, along with fuel and spare parts, and machine shops, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
You don't dig caves. Caves are, technically speaking, Karst formations. Caves are pre-existing geological features that you locate and move in to. Ditto for lava tubes.
The things you mention are challenges, certainly, but not exactly surprises. Also not impossible obstacles.
working on a manned version of their Dragon spacecraft.
As you probably know, the current Dragon is already capable of carrying humans, it's just not "man-rated" yet because it lacks a launch-abort escape system. They will probably begin manned test flights by the end of 2015.
In the meantime, SpaceX continues to push the envelope on other fronts. Next weekend's CRS-3 launch will have landing legs, and attempt a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. By next year they could be regularly recovering and reusing the F9 first stage, which would dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight. That alone would be a game changer, but that's just one of many innovations they're working on.
I'm just old enough to remember the Apollo program, and to me, the last couple of years have been the most exciting period of space exploration since the early 80s. The Shuttle was supposed to usher in the era of reusable spacecraft, but it turned out to be far more difficult than expected. Instead of 50 flights per year, we were lucky to get even a 10th of that volume. We've been stuck in LEO ever since. Right now, SpaceX is well positioned to be the first to give us the ability to get beyond that again.
I can hardly wait!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
maybe even RTGs
I wouldn't get my hopes up...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Terrestrial
Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
If the construction crews wore the kind of suits that someone would wear at 115,000 ft altitude.
generated using the sabatier reaction and electrolysis, respectively
Where will all of the feed stock come from?
I've got the sneaking suspicion that lots and lots of people don't realize what a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
You don't dig caves.
My fault. Should have said "tunnels", because maybe there aren't Martian caves where we think it's best (or even "ok") to live.
And even if there are, what if they have to be extended, enlarged, strengthened, etc?
Bottom line: why would anyone live in a place that's drier and colder than the Atacama, has much less atmosphere, and is a minimum of 34M miles from everyone else? (Because of the distance and gravity, "Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Settling space doesn't imply abandoning Earth. It just increases the chance that at least some humans will survive in case something takes out Earth.
This system would be capable of transporting 100 colonists at a time to Mars, and would be fully reusable.
I initially misread that as saying that the 100 colonists would be reusable.
Well, they need something to eat!
I, on the other hand, feel no need to be nice in responding to Luddite swill.
Your exact argument could have been used circa 1500 in opposing exploration and development of the Americas.
a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
We have such a supply chain right here on Earth. For the rest: In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Why dig a tunnel when you can blow up an inflatable hab module and pile a bunch of regolith on top? In 1/3rd gravity, you wouldn't even need heavy equipment, just bring a couple of shovels (or better yet, make them from local materials with the 3D-printer you brought from home).
There are lots of people studying every aspect of living and working on Mars. For example, one guy has figured out how to make cement with all-Martian materials. Others are working on sintering techniques for brick and glass, or extracting water, aluminum, etc..
No one is suggesting that it will be "easy", but if you think it's "delusional" you haven't been keeping up with the latest research.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Deja emacs, you troll.
zero chance. Mars one is talking about putting individual dragons connecting together, on the surface. There is little chance of that really working for ppl and dealing with the constant radiation.
In addition, Mars one talks about sending 6 ppl at a time. SpaceX is doing 100 at a time.
What Mars one is, is a back-up plan IFF SpaceX fails. Otherwise, SpaceX will be on mars BEFORE Mars-one launches a mission with the robots (though they MIGHT be able to launch one or two exploratory missions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I imagine it has something to do with the fact that It takes considerably less energy to escape Earth entirely than to go into even a low orbit, and what is to be gained by stopping in orbit? The craft you transfer to will have had to already make the trip up itself, you may as well just put your passengers in it and save the stop. Our rocket technology is mostly not terribly dependent on whether it's operating in air or vacuum, and for a reusable craft you have to be able to land on Mars and take off again with minimal planet-side infrastructure anyway, so any potential strength and weight reductions for an craft unsuitable for an Earth launch would be severely limited - most of the benefit could likely be gained from a breakaway 1st stage that just handles getting the rocket to a Mars-surface equivalent gravity-well "depth".
Moreover, the vast majority of the craft weight is fuel and tanks which will need to be landed to refuel anyway - no sense adding a bunch of fuel-hauling longboats if you can gracefully land the gas tanks rocket on their tail. The reason the moon missions used a lander were probably twofold: control systems were not yet advanced enough to land a full rocket on it's tail, and fuel for the entire mission had to be carried from Earth. If you could refuel on the Moon then it might well have made more sense to land the whole, potentially much smaller, EarthMoon rocket and refuel it.
Where space-only vessels become useful is once you have multiple "ports" with their own "longboat" / space elevator infrastructure already in place to allow cargo/passenger transfer and refueling. After all surface-to-orbit is the most expensive part of the trip, and much can be gained by not needing to include the capacity to handle that, but only if it doesn't mean hauling along a completely second vessel for the ride.
Alternately if ion drives were mature enough to propel the interplanetary stage, but not yet powerful enough for a surface launch, then the massive efficiency boost might make it worth having it a separate landing vehicle - no sense dropping a large useless ion drive into a gravity well and hauling it up again. Since most of the weight is the drive rather than the fuel as with rockets it changes the dynamics of the situation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Here's a visualization of the MCT Heavy Lift Vehicles, to scale with the existing Falcon 9 and the under-construction Falcon 9 Heavy. (Rocket designation is fictional, of course.) The visualization includes possible cargo shrouds.
Yes, this monster will have a larger lift capacity than the Saturn V. Each individual Raptor is less capable than an F-1 engine, but there will be nine of them, rather than five.
I think it is a stretch to even suggest that Mars One is a backup plan to SpaceX. At best I would put Inspiration Mars (Dennis Tito's project) in that realm, assuming Mr. Tito goes anywhere with his project as well.
I saw a Reddit conversation with the guys of Mars One that showed they really knew almost nothing about the technical side of things, and sort of thought they could magically buy anything they needed to get the job done. That might work for something such as an Antarctic expedition where the tools and experience of going there has already been done and is in large scale production for other purposes, but it doesn't work for going well beyond the frontier of human experience.
At least SpaceX has put stuff into space, where photos like this are something that their equipment has actually taken. The guys with Mars One have been no higher than what you can get with a commercial jetliner, and that is as a passenger as well. I like big dreams, but either company needs to unfortunately produce much of the equipment needed for going to Mars in-house as nobody else is even making the stuff necessary. SpaceX knows how to make stuff that works in space and has stuff in space right now to show it can get the job done. What does Mars One even have?