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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.
I dunno. They've managed to land boosters on barges in the ocean. They've managed to land boosters on dry land. They're getting pretty good at landing these things.
"How do they plan on restarting the magnetic core?"
I once saw a documentary on how to do this. I'm not saying that you use nukes. But you use nukes.
The video is clearly stylized and not meant to be taken that literally. Unless you think the arrival of the spacecraft is supposed to make Mars spin until it develops oceans ;)
That said, while there's much to like, there's one aspect of it that's really clawing at me... the fact that they plan to make it out of composites. Including the LOX tank. We've never succeeded (and failed multiple times) at making flight-intent LOX tanks for orbital rockets. And they want to make the first time be on what's by far the largest rocket ever built? Without a lining?
Is it worth mentioning that they just had an explosion somehow related to the only major carbon fiber component in the Falcon 9 in a LOX tank?
CF becomes brittle in LOX. It leaks. And most concerningly, it's impact / shock sensitive in LOX. At atmospheric pressure it usually won't do a self-sustained burn on impact, but it chars on impact, and even that alone would be bad. But they plan to have significant pressure as well. He mentions briefly that they expect this to be one of the biggest challenges, getting stable coatings and the like. I think that's an understatement.
I just don't want to see the largest rocket ever built turn into the largest flying fireball on Earth. I don't trust composites with LOX. Composite cryogenics tanks are an active research topic, and they're making progress, but it's not a solved problem.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
No point in keeping people waiting in orbit.
Actually, it's quite possible that the mass of the fuel that would be lost to boil-off is greater than the mass of extra life support required to keep the crew alive a couple of extra weeks.
As for making people wait - normally people's time is considered extremely valuable, but in this case we're talking about people who voluntarily signed up to move permanently to an isolated, barren, frozen, airless wasteland covered in abrasive, (mildly?) poisonous dust. Anyone who does so would probably rather spend the time waiting in "SPAAACCCCCEEEEE!" than on Earth, anyway.
(Or at least they think they would... perhaps sending the people up first is an opportunity to find out who's going to get cold feet before it becomes economically infeasible to bring them home? Sending up a reusable Dragon capsule to collect a few such people from LEO at the last minute is surely cheaper than dealing with the all of the horrible problems that unwilling, depressed, panicky, or constantly space-sick colonists would tend to cause.)