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SpaceX Shows Off Its Interplanetary Transport System in New Video (techcrunch.com)
Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to send humans to Mars with a ship called the Interplanetary Transport System, the company announced today in a video, revealing how the ITS will actually work. The ITS will be capable of carrying up to 100 tons of cargo -- people and supplies -- and it will utilize a slew of different power sources en route to Mars. From a report on TechCrunch: SpaceX has released a new video showing a CG concept of its Interplanetary Transport System, the rocket and spacecraft combo it plans to use to colonize Mars. The video depicts a reusable rocket that can get the interplanetary spacecraft beyond Earth's orbit, and a craft that uses solar sails to coast on its way to a Mars entry. The booster returns to Earth after separating from the shuttlecraft to pick up a booster tank full of fuel, which it then returns to orbit to fuel up the waiting spaceship. The booster craft then also returns to Earth under its own power, presumably also for re-use. The solar arrays that the spacecraft employs provide 200 kW of power, according to captions in the video.The Verge is live blogging SpaceX's conference, and has details on specs.
That's some incredibly sophisticated vapor. Amazing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
They show the spaceship being launched first, to be refueled by a drone tanker. Shouldn't the tanker be launched first? Unlike the spaceship, it can wait indefinitely in orbit if the second launch is delayed.
They say it can transport about 100 tons. That's not much for a colonization effort. The Mayflower that transported the pilgrims to America was rated at about 180 tons. They could expect to live off the land for the most part whereas whoever takes the trip to Mars will be entirely dependent on what they bring with them. Without help from the natives it's likely that the Mayflower's people would not have done as well if they managed to survive at all. Maybe the Martians will help Musk's colonists.
NASA figured that out a long time ago.
Maybe I'm missing something but why not launch the propellant tanker first and have it wait in orbit for the manned craft ?
Get back to me when they have something in orbit.
Probably the most interesting bit, after the 50s-esque ship landing on mars, is the terraforming teaser at the end...
I wanna more about that!!
How do they plan on restarting the magnetic core?
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Why not send the fuel thank up first?
Musk takes this seriously?
Yeah, but the Pilgrims had to haul a lot of Bibles since the unknown wilderness they were shipped off too had Satan hiding behind every tree.
There's no trees on Mars.
The hardest part of space travel is probably fuel economy which is why it makes little sense to see the booster rocket land on its own power. Sure, you can do it, but if you rely on your rocket engines entirely to decelerate (as the video clearly shows), you would need roughly double the fuel. Instead, what NASA and every other space agency has done, is to rely on parachutes and air resistance (yep, all the fire on the bottom of the shuttle, or a mercury capsule means that air resistance is actually slowing the spacecraft down). This is much more efficient. Another alternative would be to use the boosters for the final few seconds.
And yes, I learned this playing Kerbal Space Program and Elon should know better since he plays too;)
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Heavy lift for the Saturn V was: ~90,000 lbs of end-payload, for a trip to the moon. This new thing is 200,000 lbs or payload, so more than twice the heavy lift capacity of the biggest rocket the U.S. ever made, unless they break it up into smaller component launches. I want to be there when that rocket launches, albeit at a safe distance! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, it does make sense. They're already using the rocket engines to land. The trick is that they're landing empty, so the thrust required is tiny compared to the thrust required for launch.
And that's different from NASA/Energia how?
Space ex has a failure rate 10 times worse. The FAA needs to step in and force them to take safety seriously.
Failing, as it turns out, is an effective way of trying new things and finding out what works. Painful, but very very effective.
The best thing about SpaceX is that they aren't afraid of failure.
The worst thing that could happen would be if the FAA steps in and no longer allows companies to fail. If you aren't allowed to fail, you're not allowed to innovate. The only way to take the chance of doing new things is by taking the risk of failure.
Or, to use a quote: “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
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I'm surprised no one else noticed or commented yet on the final images. Elon isn't just talking travel in this clip - not even just settling the planet - he implies subtly that we can bring water back to Mars and terraform it. Mars goes from the red planet, to Red and Green and Blue. Now that's ambition. But, should we expect anything else from an alien
...terraform the entire planet of Mars in about 7 years, according to the video.
It just will NOT work.
Investors should bail out now.
Give mankind a few decades on Mars and we'll have Global Warming there too, we'll find a way even without Oil/Gas/Coal...
Yeah, but on Mars, global warming is a good thing!
So let's say I save up $200k for a ticket to Mars. How do I sustain myself when I get there ? become an "organic" potato farmer ? Plus the return trip seems to only involve returning the capsule for re-use, not a large payload of people or manufactured goods or raw materials. Mars needs an economy as well as an atmosphere.
Nullius in verba
Why hasn't anyone pointed that out yet? o.O
Surprised nobody commented on this yet. 42 engines! Not only is that obviously "the answer", but it has some issues.
Let's say each engine is 99.9% reliable. That means the whole stage is .999^42 = about 96% reliable.. Sure you can maybe have enough thrust to recover from losing an engine or three but the trouble is engine failures on rockets tend to be catastrophic. They usually mean loss of the mission due to cascading damage and fires and so on. It's not redundancy if everything is so close together, you can ask aircraft mfgs who have learned that lesson the hard way when so called "redundant" lines both are severed by the same damage event leading to loss of a/c no matter what the failure models said.
I'm sceptical. Guess they might not reuse it as much as they say they can.
Not until someone actually DID it.
I figure it's vaporware. I'm about 99% certain it is. But I HOPE that it's not.
And I hope they make a serious stab at this, even if it goes completely pear-shaped. Either we'll get people on Mars, or else we'll learn a way that didn't work, and that could lead us to the way that does. But one way or another, someone's going to have to break trail.
I know you're joking, but modern day colonists could haul a billion Bibles and not add any weight, thanks to modern storage. They also wouldn't need a printing press, for the same reason. OTOH, the printing press was used to jack the timbers and save the ship, so maybe they should have a lightweight jack on board, just in case. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?