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SpaceX Pulls the Plug On Its Red Dragon Plans (arstechnica.com)
SpaceX has largely confirmed the rumors that the company is no longer planning to send an uncrewed version of its Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2020, or later. Ars Technica reports: The company had planned to use the propulsive landing capabilities on the Dragon 2 spacecraft -- originally developed for the commercial crew variant to land on Earth -- for Mars landings in 2018 or 2020. Previously, it had signed an agreement with NASA to use some of its expertise for such a mission and access its deep-space communications network. On Tuesday, however, during a House science subcommittee hearing concerning future NASA planetary science missions, Florida Representative Bill Posey asked what the agency was doing to support privately developed planetary science programs. Jim Green, who directs NASA's planetary science division, mentioned several plans about the Moon and asteroids, but he conspicuously did not mention Red Dragon. After this hearing, SpaceX spokesman John Taylor didn't return a response to questions from Ars about the future of Red Dragon. Then, during a speech Wednesday at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference, Musk confirmed that the company is no longer working to land Dragon propulsively for commercial crew.
"Yeah, that was a tough decision," Musk acknowledged Wednesday with a sigh. "The reason we decided not to pursue that heavily is that it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport," Musk explained Wednesday. "There was a time when I thought the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where you've got a base heat shield and side mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars. But now I'm pretty confident that is not the right way." Musk added that his company has come up with a "far better" approach to landing on Mars that will be incorporated into the next iteration of the company's proposed Mars transportation hardware.
"Yeah, that was a tough decision," Musk acknowledged Wednesday with a sigh. "The reason we decided not to pursue that heavily is that it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport," Musk explained Wednesday. "There was a time when I thought the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where you've got a base heat shield and side mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars. But now I'm pretty confident that is not the right way." Musk added that his company has come up with a "far better" approach to landing on Mars that will be incorporated into the next iteration of the company's proposed Mars transportation hardware.
Let the tax payer fund the research and iron out all the kinks , then we will swoop in and take all the profit.
Yeah, Apollo didn't have requirements. And they just fired people at the moon and hoped they wouldn't crash too fast to get out and survive. P.S. "not been done before"? Only to a particular planet, not "in history". In fact, NASA are pretty famous as being the only people in history to have ever done it, and then brought them back safely, ever.
Bollocks does NASA not have requirements, or not make them generally known if people need their authorisation. They probably had people spending years on NOTHING MORE THAN THAT.
Cheap, routine, safe. Pick any two.
US launches stagnated because the money wasn't available, despite being asked for. NASA does just a tiny bit more than just look for new toys. What I claim is that if Musk's investment had been put into NASA *specifically* for research in that exact area, they'd have done a better job of it. But also, that if the money had been available, they could have done something much more interesting with it.
Tesla - we disagree. It's a low-volume, barely mass-market vehicle propped up by a zero-profit venture selling basically at a loss. The technological innovations are absolutely minimal and have been replicated and surpassed by every car manufacturer on the planet in the space of a couple of years. Maybe credit for "prompting" that, certainly not for having done anything that couldn't have been achieved with an "we must have electric vehicles" impetus from government, industry or investors.
A decade is a LONG time in industry. Technologies can come and go in that time. I honestly don't believe Tesla have done anything amazing beyond pouring money into existing techs (that historically didn't exist or weren't viable in their state, but Tesla didn't *change* or *invent* the batteries, motors, etc. they just used things that came onto the market which were viable).
Tesla, ten years down the line:
Quarter Total production Model X sales
Q1 2016 15,510 2,400
Q2 2016 18,345 4,638
Q3 2016 25,185 8,774
Q4 2016 24,882 9,500
Smart Cars (niche, tiny automobiles) have sold 1.7m units of one single model of theirs.
Tesla are a drop in the damn ocean in industry, incredibly overvalued, by comparison.
Sorry, but Musk isn't anything more than a guy with lots of money to burn, and people willing to take it away from him. Sure, it's easy to give away cars and space rockets at losses and never make it to continued viability, and generate a lot of press along the way. It doesn't mean he's a good businessman or should hold any weight in industry whatsoever.
He's an eccentric, throwing money at sci-fi toys. Of course things "work". But he gets bored quick, never really gets much done, and certainly doesn't make any decent profit doing so. Investors wouldn't do what he did, precisely because of what's happened to most of the money he puts in. He's hoping each venture will not only create a new market but THAT HE WILL OWN THAT MARKET, and thus pay himself back. Which is ridiculous. And not how it's going.
Let the moron spend all the R&D money and find out what people "like", then the multi-billion dollar companies who have to make profit will cherry-pick anything that's successful and take over in a year leaving him with nothing. There's a reason that electric cars are still an incredibly niche market, because they aren't selling. Even Tesla's.
There's a reason people don't just start up space companies, because they are relatively unprofitable and hugely risky. There's a reason even NASA don't do much manned spaceflight any more. There's a reason train companies aren't investing billions in sci-fi trains.
He's an idealist, sure. But he's not going to ever find something so fantabulously amazing that other people couldn't have found quicker and easier if they decided to burn the same amount of money in the same areas.
Here's a quick rule-of-thumb that I've learned from 45 years of disappointment:
Anyone who says they're going to send a man to Mars is full of shit. Any date they announce is bullshit. Any plan they announce will never happen. Any technology they plan to use will never materialize.
Now there, print that out and keep it handy for future reference. It will save you a lot of heartache in the future.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.