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SpaceX Intends To Send a Red Dragon To Mars As Early As 2018 (blastingnews.com)
Reader MarkWhittington writes: SpaceX has announced that it intends to send a version of its Dragon spacecraft, called "Red Dragon," to Mars as early as 2018. The mission, to be launched on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket, would be the first to another planet conducted by a commercial enterprise. The flight of the Red Dragon would be the beginning of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's long-term dream of building a settlement on Mars.Ars Technica reports: According to the company, these initial test missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars. This series of missions, to be launched on the company's not-yet-completed Falcon Heavy rocket, will provide key data for SpaceX as the company develops an overall plan to send humans to the Red Planet to colonize Mars. One of the biggest challenges in landing on Mars is the fact that its atmosphere is so thin it provides little braking capacity. To land the 900kg Curiosity rover on Mars, NASA had to devise the complicated sky crane system that led to its "Seven Minutes of Terror." A Dragon would weigh much more, perhaps about 6,000kg. To solve this problem, SpaceX plans to use an upgraded spacecraft, a Dragon2 powered by eight SuperDraco engines, to land using propulsion.
So they're pretty much guaranteed to meet their goal.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
Is it going to play a 13-minute version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida after successfully landing?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Contemporary culture is turning into mass hallucination - we're becoming our own cargo cult.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
I think he is off to a good start. Don't know about the time table. He has successfully shown that he can perform this type of lift and landing. He's not demonstrated reliability just yet, but he has been successful and this looks to be the beginning of a pattern. He has shown that he can perform second stage upper orbit capabilities so this one should just require the larger rocket. It's a little behind schedule, but barring any major setbacks, he and his crew should be able to perform a limited landing in the near future. Less than two years? Hopeful but not optimistic.
It's much warmer there, and with all that energy and thick atmosphere, there is a lot more to work with. It is comparatively alive compared to Mars.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What else would you call a "dragon" you sent to the "red planet"
but the missions themselves were managed centrally - the most efficient and effective approach (by definition).
Only if the management is done right.
I really hope this is a success, this would demonstrate the viability of the private industry moving humanity into space. We as a race need to see this happen.
I wonder how many impact craters he will create until he gets one right?
For top level organisation, the free market is a great first approximation, but that's all. One moves away from it, not toward it.
The best idea is to keep moving to the best solution, without useless dogma.
"Environmental" groups that see any human advancement as an affront to the "natural order"
A bunch of bullshit. You might find one or two kooks, but the vast majority don't have a problem with it.
politicians who have spent years touting the "difficulty" of space travel and necessity of vast expenditures in money/resources to their states/districts
So SpaceX will find space travel hard because politicians and the aeronautics industry will make it hard? What if space travel is simply a challenging field?
Your views are ignorant and misinformed---and some of them are not not particularly falsifiable. Brilliant thinking. (sarcasm there)
I don't think they can settle on Mars either, but I still applaud his efforts, because a) he's investing his own money in his dream, and b) something useful will come out of this, even if the primary mission fails.
Decades ago, aerospace research was all private, then the government started buying in because it realised the benefit to the miliatary.
FTFY
I guess WWI was 'a few decades' but governments have been heavily involved in aerospace for quite some time. Remember, Jules Verne and Robert Heinlein never actually built anything.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm having a hard time believing its going to happen anytime soon, but not due to technological hurtles and not even necessarily due to financial ones either. Any US company/individual interested in traveling out into the solar system on their own is going to face a gauntlet of red tape. "Environmental" groups that see any human advancement as an affront to the "natural order". Entrenched business interests that see it as a threat to their profit margins. And politicians who have spent years touting the "difficulty" of space travel and necessity of vast expenditures in money/resources to their states/districts. Against that SpaceX is going to have one heck of an uphill battle, though they did face a similar one just getting into the launch industry so while it might take a while they could very well succeed.
What, PETA has found 'Mars Hamsters' or something? Greenpeace has the "Vacuum Warrior"?
The Sierra Club is going to stand on "Of Course I'll Still Love You" and try to block a launch?
When was the last time you past the Turing Test?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
1. Prior performance is not a guarantee, but it can be a good indicator. Tesla, in particular, is a suitable benchmark since both firms deal primarily with engineering challenges, supply logistics, and government regulatory bodies.
2. Not exactly a suitable comparison. The European conquerors couldn't bring their own air or constitute fuel and food from basic compounds. We can. I question why we should bother, but we certainly can adapt to less favorable terrain better than they could.
3. The Pyramids are a huge tourist destination (in spite of intermittent regional political issues), and they demonstrate a degree of achievement which was astounding given the tools of the day.
I'm not sure there's much value in establishing a Martian colony in this decade, but we will need to get ourselves off this rock. Especially given our concerted efforts to ignore the fact that we are destabilizing the climate and ecology.
All of the same fundamental engineering challenges will be there whether we do it now or later, so we might as well start working on them now.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Seriously, once the first one goes, it should be possible to land 2-4 tonnes on Mars. And with it being enclosed, it should be easy to control the HVAC for various instruments. The real problem is, how to get things out of there. Probes. Landers. Etc.
Regardless, if SpaceX is successful, which I would be shocked if they are not, then it will dramatically change how we study Mars.
Best of all, this will costs a fraction of what the other missions have costs. Heck, we should be able to send a red dragon AND 1-2 sats using a $100 M falcon heavy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
if not NASA? (n/t)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So can you explain why Spacelab's orbit decayed?
I mean, since thin air has no effect, right?
Difficult to explain since "Spacelab" never existed.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Correction - there was a "Spacelab" that was carried up in the Shuttle and back down to Earth in the Shuttle. It had no independent orbit, and did not decay.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
and fanboys will take that for the real thing.
also note if you post something critical of SpaceX, they will flame your butt. One person who continually posted critical remarks (or negative as some saw it) about the New Space crowd in many space forums and was banned from all of them except one (comments in Spudis lunar blog). He had reasons, whether people agreed or not but he did raise some interesting points such as if going beyond earth orbit need LH2/LOX and also raised caution of Ayd Rand policies for space programs.
mfwright@batnet.com
It was gigantic. And it was also going very fast.
The government has been involved in developing aerospace technology since WW1. The government doesn't actually research or build anything. They pay the private sector to research and build things. The private companies supply the US military with aerospace technology but they are also in the business of building commercial aircraft.
One thing good about the dragon heavy is the capacity. The best thing they could do is maximize every launch by taking more raw resources into space and leaving them up there in storage. Imagine if they created storage depots both in front of and behind space stations. That would minimize risk to manned space stations due to space garbage.
We seriously need to build fuel storage depots up there along with junkyards where metal can be recycled so we can start building in space.
Are we privy to a great becoming?
The missing ingredient here is a sponsor. Having said that, this could be a pretty cheap mission as these things go. NASA would be nice, but the cost would be low enough for various private industry or research groups to be involved. Perhaps several could band together and split the costs.
Decades ago, aerospace research was all private, then the government started buying in because it realised the benefit to society. For a while, the government managed aerospace research, and for a while, the US accelerated at a magnificent pace. Then neoliberalism came along, and for no reason at all we're contracting management back out to private industry. SpaceX has the best marketing machine in aerospace.
Sorry, but this is rather stupid historical revisionism. NASA didn't stop "accelerating" because some market enthusiasts or whatnot (the so-called "neoliberals"). They stopped accelerating because their political masters never cared where NASA was going. Once JFK's commitment was fulfilled by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969, that was it for "acceleration". The entire life of NASA (from birth in 1957) has been theater with a few big photo ops for the involved politicians to exploit.
N.B. This isn't a post against involvement of private industry: one should always choose the best specialist, and they're often found in the private sector. This is what NASA used to do, but the missions themselves were managed centrally - the most efficient and effective approach (by definition).
Sure, any political vote buying scheme, whether it be Social Security or NASA, works best if the politician can show a direct connection from their actions to the largess of the scheme.
But if you want to do something other than buying votes rather inefficiently for yourself, then maybe central planning (which is not the most efficient and effective approach in general nor in definition) is not for you.
You also apparently wrote further down the tree:
For top level organisation, the free market is a great first approximation, but that's all. One moves away from it, not toward it.
Depends what the organization is. SpaceX isn't managed by the market, for example, even though it does have a lot of interactions with markets. Free markets are great for societies, for example. And it is remarkable how a lot of the criticism of free markets comes actually from the breaking of the markets rather than the functioning of the markets. Where else can you be criticized for the things we prevented you from doing?
With space development, the key obstruction has been high cost of access to space. That cost has warped everything that is done in space. The end result is that the costs of objects put in space tends to be between five and ten times the cost of the launch with extremely low cost objects being test launches on a new, risky rocket design and the most expensive launches tending to be high end military and research projects.
SpaceX has the potential to drop those costs by a factor of ten or more (depending where you start). That means you could put around ten times as much mass in space to do something without the hardcore mass shaving, reliability, and other optimizations common to current space projects.
Since Red Dragons are Chaotic Evil, it seems that they might lose control of it. They should send a Gold Dragon instead, since they're Lawful Good.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
such as if going beyond earth orbit need LH2/LOX and also raised caution of Ayd Rand policies for space programs.
Sounds like there was a good justification for the flaming. I've run into people who care about the danger that there might be libertarians or objectivists in space. These people are to a man dumb.
Why should we worry more about libertarians in space than progressives in space? Well, aside from the former being more likely to be in space? Har har har.
Also, a lot of the criticism of New Space, SpaceX, and similar topics is rather dumb (you might see a theme here). I don't admire the ability to ignore 60 years of wreckage from the ways that supposedly work better, but never seem to get us anywhere. They don't have that problem, of course. There's always some Emmanuel Goldstein holding us back.
What else would you call a "dragon" you sent to the "red planet"
Up Goer.
"His name was James Damore."
SpaceX will be the first entity to place humans on Mars.
And even after that upset is in the history books, there will still be some people who cling to the fantasy that government does things more efficiently than private enterprise.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I've speculated before on /. about how much effort/cost it would be for SpaceX to do a manned moon mission.
If they can do this Mars mission (landing on Mars but not returning), exactly the same hardware can do a lunar landing and return. From here we see for Mars mission:
Delta-v LEO to Mars transfer typical value 4.3 km/s
Transfer orbit to Mars capture orbit 0.9 km/s
Capture orbit to low orbit 1.4 km/s
Low orbit to surface 4.1 km/s
Total delta-v from LEO: 10.7 km/s
Lunar mission:
LEO to low lunar orbit: 1.3 km/s
Low lunar orbit to surface: 1.9 km/s
Surface to LLO: 1.9 km/s
LLO to Earth intercept: 1.3km/s (then you can aerobrake and re-enter)
Total delta-v from LEO: 6.4 km/s
Dragon 2 will have life support, and carry people. Red Dragon presumably won't. So to make it a manned mission they would need to reduce Red Dragon's delta-v capability by about 4-5km/s and use the saved weight to put in Dragon 2's manned capabilities (possibly for fewer people than Dragon 2.) Possibly (probably?) Dragon 2's life support requires a service module, and we haven't budgeted for that, so maybe it is a bit more complicated.
An unmanned Red Dragon to the moon seems a sensible step before Mars - you get to find out about mistakes in a few days, instead of nearly 2 years.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The problem with Venus, as with Mars, is the lack of a decent magnetosphere. Earth's magnetosphere is it's "Secret Sauce." It's difficult to get a decent biome going when every medium-sized gamma burst from the sun bombards the planet's surface. You could build lead-lined underground bunkers and grow everything using redirected light from sonotubes, but then you might as well just colonize the moon.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
This mission seems very hard to justify from a commercial view point.
Wikipedia says
"As of May 2012, SpaceX had operated on total funding of approximately $1 billion in its first ten years of operation. Of this, private equity provided about $200M, with Musk investing approximately $100M and other investors having put in about $100M."
So (as of four years ago) Musk only owns about 50% of SpaceX, so it isn't his plaything to do with as he wishes. How is this squared with the other investors?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
We'll see when they start paying their bills on time.
Suppliers may start putting them on a short leash with their credit limit.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT