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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.
Elon Musk = D.D. Harriman, only with bigger dreams.
And not a fictional character.
Why is putting humans into a forbidding, empty, hostile radiation-blasted hell so important?
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.
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.
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...
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
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.