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NASA Announces New Mars Probe, While SpaceX Is Urged To Focus on Launches
NASA will land a new probe on Mars on November 26, 2018, "paving the way toward an ambitious journey to send humans to the Red Planet," according to one NASA official. The $828 million project will investigate how the planet was formed, NASA announced Friday, calling it "an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about the internal structure of the Red Planet."
Meanwhile, long-time Slashdot reader taiwanjohn shares an editorial published by Ars Technica the same day, titled "We love you SpaceX, and hope you reach Mars. But we need you to focus." Noting that SpaceX receives the majority of its funding from NASA, the site's senior space editor writes that the company's business model requires that they ultimately deliver a reusable launch system. "I understand SpaceX has a master plan -- the company wants to colonize Mars... But at some point you have to focus on the here and now, and that is the Falcon 9 rocket... if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business."
In a related story, Saturday NASA's history office shared a photograph from the Viking 2's landing on the surface of Mars -- which happened exactly 40 years ago.
Meanwhile, long-time Slashdot reader taiwanjohn shares an editorial published by Ars Technica the same day, titled "We love you SpaceX, and hope you reach Mars. But we need you to focus." Noting that SpaceX receives the majority of its funding from NASA, the site's senior space editor writes that the company's business model requires that they ultimately deliver a reusable launch system. "I understand SpaceX has a master plan -- the company wants to colonize Mars... But at some point you have to focus on the here and now, and that is the Falcon 9 rocket... if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business."
In a related story, Saturday NASA's history office shared a photograph from the Viking 2's landing on the surface of Mars -- which happened exactly 40 years ago.
They need to keep doing whatever they are doing.
An explosion of a rocket is nothing. I wish them another hundred of them, and the attached room to make mistakes.
The goal is not to not trigger these sensationalist dipshit journalists but to actually make progress, burning some millions is collateral damage.
"...why not send a probe to uranus"...
I just wish someone would figure out a way to get off the planet without a blasted explosion under their ass.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Maybe the editors should also just group together other articles? Like you have one article about Stallman wanting to allow anonymous payment, and another about Apple approving certain crypto-currencies - just lump those together, they're about the same thing.
When I saw that they were going to land a probe in two years, I thought "I hope they're launching it tomorrow then."
Is NASA honestly worried about the 2040 headline "first humans on Mars dead because they didn't know how the planet was formed"?
It's not just that. NASA is in such a mess right now that I'm not expecting them doing things like launching manned Mars missions any time soon or having streaks of inspiring successes. Launches are good, but if you're really a space enthusiast you'd want way more than launches, and NASA doesn't deliver much these days – even though when they do, they do amazing. If SpaceX sticks to launches, they would be reduced to a small part of what excites me about them, and they would become just another launch company.
Furthermore, it's a false dichotomy. They don't have to choose between launches and pursuing lofty goals. Reusability is a product of Musk's desire to get to Mars. Reusability was the only way to make space travel affordable and routine, which is why SpaceX went pursuing it, and we wouldn't be having it if they hadn't been looking further ahead. Their Mars current ambitions may sound crazy, but they are incremental and upscaled versions of what they've learned with the Falcon 9, experience that would be partly wasted if left only for the F9 and not expanded. And it's not like the Mars plans are taking up a major piece of the company's resources or anything...
And seriously, a rocket blowing up is an unpleasant, unwanted setback that shouldn't have happened, but focus is not something that would have prevented it, nor would changing focus prevent further such incidents. SpaceX are right on track with their goals, they will find out what they did wrong after they've done investigating this incident, not by reading meaningless suggestions beforehand.
I'm not a US Citizen and I don't have any affiliation with SpaceX. I read that Ars article when it first came out, but it really annoyed me.
If you've seen the video, it's reasonably clear that the initial signs of trouble - i.e. the start of the explosion - happens right at the top of the First Stage, perhaps where the Second Stage engine might be situated within the casing. OK, that means that we could narrow this down to a rough physical location.
Yet on this, Ars reckon that they know what the fault is and that the fault lies with SpaceX. They may even be right...
But...
1. Do Ars know that for a fact? No.
2. Do Ars know whether the launch was a repeat of a previously known-good configuration, or whether SpaceX were trying out new design and/or components? No.
3. Do Ars know whether the Facebook payload imposed any specific requirements on the Falcon configuration that might have led to the incident? No.
Yet despite a complete and utter lack of knowledge of the subject at hand [except, I concede again, that the rocket blew up! ], Ars reckon that they know how to tell SpaceX and Elon musk how to run their space launch business... There could be literally scores or hundreds of reasons behind the failure. That failure could be design, material defect, or process in nature, or it could be an obscure combination of several things. It could quite easily be a failure induced on SpaceX because of constraints imposed elsewhere, by someone else.
I'm quite certain that there will be people who read this comment and think ("Ah, SpaceX fan-boy there...") but you'd be wrong. I'm not writing this because I'm a particular fan of SpaceX, but because I'm particularly unimpressed with the arrogance and disengenuous nature of Ars reporting. [ If the launch had been perfect, no doubt they would have been writing about the "unstoppable SpaceX" ].
No. A lot of the time, a lot of the Ars journalists are respectable and write thoughtful pieces. This, on the other hand, was opportunistic garbage written by an ambulance-chasing waster.
Eric Burger: If you're so good, how about you go design a rocket that can put the same mass into LEO and show us all how it's done, eh?
Stop going to Mars. Go somewhere else interesting. Titan, maybe. Or Triton. Europa. Mercury. Venus, even. But we know enough about Mars for diminishing returns to set in.
I understand where you are coming from, but with this explosion, a $200M customer's satellite was destroyed. Satellites take years to build and qualify for flight, so this isn't something that can just replaced if the original was destroyed on the launchpad.
If you go back to the late 1950s/1960s, the US (and Russian) rocket failure rate was largely underscored by the fact that the "boosters" were actually intercontinental missiles and, as a national defense program, there was a certain budget/expectation/tolerance for failure.
What SpaceX (and the other launchers) need is a large corporation/government that is willing to absorb the cost of a certain amount of failures with the goal of highly reliable & robust access to space at low cost. To do this, they need a number of "missions" sending up much less valuable (but useful) cargo. I would think that simple satellites filled with tanks of oxygen, hydrogen and other required gasses as well as structural members which can be used in the future would be interesting and not take years to build.
Who would pay for this? How about Apple and other corporations with billions in off shore accounts, hiding the capital from the tax man. Bring the money back iinto the US and use it to create high-tech jobs and new capabilities.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The Viking missions were really annoying:
Step 1: Devise clever experiments to detect the presence of life.
Step 2: Ship experiments to Mars at cost of $1bn (1970's dollars - that's between $5bn and $15bn 2016 dollars).
Step 3: Experiment says "WOW! We have detected life on Mars!"
Step 4: Decide that the experiment was not sufficiently good to produce a meaningful result.
Step 5: Ignore (or at least, endlessly debate) the results.
Argh! They really *REALLY* should have thought through the experiment a bit more carefully before they did that!
www.sjbaker.org
These words should be told to Timmy Cook!
After all, without the iPhone, Apple has no business.
And every iPhone not sold equals every Apple Watch no sold!
Sure, the lander is technically new because it has not yet performed its mission but the *real* news is that a new launch date has been set because InSight missed its original launch date due to a fault with a critical sensor in the primary payload. The sensor is being reworked. The rest of the "probe" was ready for launch and is now in storage awaiting the next outbound launch window to Mars. The headline - and summary - make it sound like this is a new mission altogether. Cest' la vie
A colony is an expansion into unused resources. There are none on Mars. Mars is a desert like no desert on the face of the Earth. Stop the teenage sci-fi goals please. I agree, do something adult and useful.
E Proelio Veritas.
How do you think Boeing, Lockheed, and others got their funding? Who do you think built the rockets and satellites that NASA uses? NASA never made anything, they've always had to buy it from somewhere. Nobody says Boeing was a subsidized company. But all the haters claim SpaceX is a subsidized company. That's just BS .. they are actually less subsidized than basically every other aerospace company. SpaceX gets money from government contracts. So does every company .. so whoopdee doo on that one.
I think it says something about the American space program when NASA's twitter feed is largely remembering past missions.
Someone didn't want SpaceCom being bought by the Chinese....
As for the Ars Technica op-ed, urging SpaceX to "focus" on NASA's priorities, I suspect that Elon will still reveal his plans for the MCT at the upcoming Int'l Astronautical Conference, {...} And I think he will probably take some of the advice from Ars... perhaps announcing that MCT will be put on the "back burner" for a while, so that they can get Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy flying ASAP.
(Disclaimer [with McCoy's voice]: I am a Doctor, not a Rocket Scientist)
Okay let's spend a few minutes thinking about Mars colonisation.
An actual colonisation will require slightly more than "simply" putting a probe one Mars.
(Not that putting a probe there is an easy feat by itself, as attested by past failures. Hence the quotes)
Colonisation would require sending tons of equipement in advance to wait for the colon at their future landing site.
(Basically anything that they can built from raw local material, or grow themselves in a farm)
(Think the landing site as depicted in the "Martian")
That's quite some cargo, much more than what a "tiny" probe.
Then - once the landing site is ready to receive them equipment-wise - you also need to ship the colons themselves.
Again you're not just launching one single guy (Yuri Gagarin's style) you'll be launching a whole crew.
And unlike the Apollo missions to the moon, this crew isn't there for a "short" ride (that spans a couple of days) meaning that they could basically be okay all by themselves with only basic life-support (metaphorically: a ride on a car, where you just pack some snack). This crew is going to be travel for several months, requiring a much complex and bigger habitat (metaphorically: a ride on the trans-syberian train - a whole hotel on rails).
(Think the interplanetary ships depicted in harder sci-fi like 2001 Space Odyssey, etc.)
That's again quite a big ship.
(Also lots of other ancillary equipement might need to be shipped. E.g.: communication relay satellites at Earth's and Mars' L4 and L5 point to relay data and messages when the planets aren't close and the sun's in the way)
All the above are going to weight quite a lot.
And are going to require some fuel for all the manoeuvres required to shift from Earth's to Mars' orbits.
If you hope to kick them all out of Earth's gravity well in one single go and straight to Mars from there, you're going to hit the rocket equation really hard.
(Moving all the fuck tons of payload over the whole course is going to require extremely powerful rockets and gargantuan amounts of fuel, which in turn add to the weight and requires even more bazillions of fuel).
So unless there's some miraculous revolutions in term of space-propulsion (like suddenly the emDrive getting well understood, confirming to be very effective, scaling well, and usable even for take-off and landing. And this coupled with the research in polywell-style fusors giving us extremely compact and efficient fusion reactors to power said mega-huge emDrive) (or material engineering jumping suddenly so much forward that a space elevator gets built within a decade),
the next best probable course of action is to slowly put all the necessary stuff in orbit step by step, and slowly build a "trans-orbital ferry ship" in orbit.
(Think assembling the ISS - only not so big). Then once enough content have been put out of earth gravity well, have the "space ferry" do a trip to mars orbit, drop part of its payload, then come back for more refilling/reloading, then again.
Use the ferry multiple time on multiple trips (or even assemble a couple of such "space ferries" in earth's orbit) and you can transport everything you need to mars in several goes. By the time it's finally the turn to bring astronauts, the "space ferry" technology would have been tested enough to be usable to transport the people and their habitat.
For the above to succeed, you don't need 1 single ultra-massive "mars-ca
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