Elon Musk To Unveil Mars Spacecraft Later This Year, For 2025 Flight (foxnews.com)

frank249 writes: Fox News is reporting that Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to unveil plans for the spacecraft that would send humans to Mars within a decade. Speaking at an event in Hong Kong, Musk said he was 'hoping to describe the architecture' of the spacecraft at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico in late September. "That will be quite exciting," Musk said. 'In terms of the first flight to Mars, we are hoping to do that around 2025.' As for his plans to go into space, Musk said he was hoping to reach the International Space Station 'four or five years from now.'

Comments

Re:Musk needs to get a grip

[Rei]

So for the CEO of a rocket company, making a rocket is "outside his sphere"? Interesting.

Mars Colonial Transporter

[frank249]

The first demo flight of the 27 engine Falcon Heavy is in April. SpaceX announced in May 2015 that they are positioning Dragon V2 spacecraft variants—in conjunction with the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle—to transport science payloads across much of the solar system, in cislunar and inner solar system regions such as the Moon and Mars as well as to outer solar system destinations such as Jupiter's moon Europa. Details include that SpaceX expects to be able to transport 2,000–4,000 kg (4,400–8,800 lb) to the surface of Mars, including a soft retropropulsive landing using SuperDraco thrusters following a limited atmospheric deceleration. When the destination has no atmosphere, the Dragon variant would dispense with the parachute and heat shield and add additional propellant.

SpaceX began development of the large Raptor rocket engine for the Mars Colonial Transport before 2014, but the MCT will not be operational earlier than the mid-2020s. SpaceX have not yet publicly released details of the space mission architecture nor all the system components of the MCT, nor a timeline for earliest MCT missions to Mars. Elon Musk hopes to unveil the space mission architecture at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2016.

The super-heavy lift launch vehicle for MCT is intended to be fully-reusable. Mars Colonial Transporter has been notionally described as a large interplanetary spacecraft capable of taking 100 people or 100 tonnes of cargo at a time to Mars.

Sounds far fetched but based on Musk's track record, I would not be surprised if he goes for it.

Re:Mars Colonial Transporter

[Rei]

Meh. CH4, H2 and RP1 are all clean, cheap fuels - the levels of pollution and fuel costs are practically non-issues here. ISP, thrust and density are what matter. Methane simply lies on the curve between RP-1 and H2 in terms of thrust, density and ISP (significantly closer to RP-1 than H2). H2 is easier to produce on Mars than methane, which is in turn easier to produce than RP-1 - in this regard, methane is closer to H2 than RP-1 (the mass fractions of current hydrocarbon synthesis from CO2 and H2 tend to produce more methane than heavier hydrocarbons, although the ratios depend on the catalyst, and new catalysts could change this, and you could always do subsequent steps to combine light hydrocarbons)

Methane probably is a good balance for Mars if you want local propellant production. And really, since Mars round trips are so far down the rocket equation chain, you pretty much have to either use extremely high ISP fuels, or go with local propellant production. SpaceX has chosen the latter.

Re:Musk needs to get a grip

[ColdWetDog]

Everybody knows rockets are cylinders, not spheres (unless, of course, you are a rocket physicist).