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.

Comments

as early as, but not before

[rdelsambuco]

So they're pretty much guaranteed to meet their goal.

Re:as early as, but not before

[NotDrWho]

I don't know what you're complaining about, the statement made it crystal clear that it would launch at some point between 2018 and never. How much more specific do you need??

bonus points for the church organ version

[Thud457]

Is it going to play a 13-minute version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida after successfully landing?

A good start

[deadwill69]

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.

Re:A good start

[cbhacking]

Landing Dragon should be *WAY* easier than landing a Falcon 9 first stage. You're coming in from higher and faster, but you have a heat shield, parachutes, redundant engines designed to operate at the scale of a landing craft (rather than a first-stage booster), far more structural integrity than a booster with depressurized tanks, no bending moment to speak of, engines places around your center of mass rather than at a single point below it, throttle capability sufficient to hover at least in Earth gravity (when nearly empty, a Falcon 9 cannot throttle even a single engine down to 1:1 TWR, so it can't hover), and a better RCS (thruster) system (although admittedly no grid fins).

Landing propulsively on Mars should also be much easier than landing propulsively on Earth, assuming you've got the fuel; less aerobraking (boosters can't make much use of that, although capsules can and do on Earth), but also very little wind (less buffeting, less shear) and a stable (though probably not smooth) landing zone less dynamic than a barge and bigger than a landing pad (much less a barge). Less gravity is almost certainly an advantage here too; even if it means Dragon can't hover (which I'm not sure it does), it also means Dragon doesn't need to use nearly as much fuel fighting gravity as it slows for hover or landing.

While I admire the creativity of your insults, you might have been better off by spending more time thinking about the problem than about how to insult people. You have no idea how knowledgeable your insultees are on the relevant subjects.

Also, saying "none of the precursors to this mission have been demonstrated, let alone successfully" is some serious goalpost-moving. Considering SpaceX alone, they have demonstrated Dragon 2's maximum thrust (and parachutes) and also its fine control (including hover). They haven't actually landed one propulsively yet, but I see little reason to expect that they can't do it. Falcon Heavy not launching yet is a valid point, but Falcon 9 has flown many times (as many times as single-core Delta IV rockets, at least) and its only failure was due to an extremely rare failure in a third-party component (since addressed). SpaceX has demonstrated propulsive landings knowledge, has demonstrated working long-duration space capsules, has demonstrated successful recovery of orbital capsules, and has demonstrated successful launchers. Those are all precursors to this mission, but I notice you didn't mention them...

As for going beyond LEO, while Dragon hasn't done that (and I'm not sure if Falcon 9 second stage has or not, though I expect it has), NASA and many private satellite manufacturers have; it's not exactly a problem we don't know how to address. Of course, until Curiosity, nobody had even demonstrated a multi-stage landing ending with a rocket-propelled skycrane (on Mars or otherwise), but NASA managed it anyhow.

Re:I really wish we'd go to Venus instead

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

It's also far more hostile to equipment, and there's zero chance of a manned mission there in any foreseeable future. Mars has potential for human habitation. Venus does not.

Re:I really wish we'd go to Venus instead

[npslider]

The only problem is that out of control capitalism and the Venusian Oil Cartel has led to a runaway global warming on Venus, the locals there screwed the planet up before we could get to it. They should have used Solar Power, I hear it was quite efficient there. ;)

Re:I really wish we'd go to Venus instead

[Shadow99_1]

Actually the upper bounds of the atmosphere on Venus is relatively habitable. The catch is you need a floating structure that can maintain a certain height from the ground for long periods of time (potentially decades or more). It's the lower levels of Venus which would require serious effort to manage do to pressure, temperature, and atmospheric content. This by the way is why you can google Aerostats.

Btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:intentions = hype

[khallow]

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.

Shouldn't use a Red Dragon

[sconeu]

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.

Re:Shouldn't use a Red Dragon

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I would actually suggest either Bronze or Copper...probably a Copper Dragon, since they like deserts and dry, rocky mountains. Their Chaotic Good, which is better as a pioneering adventurer than Lawful Good.

Re:These names

[Rockoon]

What else would you call a "dragon" you sent to the "red planet"

Up Goer.