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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.
Actually, it has been SpaceX doing the heavy lifting for some time now. The have worked out how to land an orbital class first stage booster on a tiny ship in the middle of the ocean without anyone paying them to do so. They have designed new engines, modules and rockets faster than anyone else in the game using modern technology instead of relying on "tried and tested" 1960's engineering. Nobody demanded that their capsules must return to the launchpad propulsively, but they pushed ahead anyway and showed in full scale testing how their superdraco engines can hover and balance. There is no legitimate reason to doubt that they have the technical ability to land propulsively. However, if the safety demands of Nasa force them to stick with old (but proven) technology, then so be it.
Amazing how many naysayers there still are after all the amazing things SpaceX have already acomplished that most people thought were completely impossible just a couple of years ago. They are saving the American tax payer millions every single day and the trolls still come out and whine. As a European, I cannot fathom how so many Americans can be so ungrateful to a company that has been the leading star in private space technology. Maybe they will screw you all over tomorrow or a decade from now, but that can be said of any company in the world.
It's like you didn't even read the article or pay attention to what he said. So I guess someone has to repeat it for you.
NASA's regulations for propulsive landing of a Dragon 2 capsule are too difficult to reasonably meet. So they're dropping propulsive landing from Dragon 2. Meaning it can't land on Mars either. At the same time, they've decided that there's a better approach to landing on Mars than Dragon 2's approach of a bottom-mounted heat shield and side-mounted thrusters.
And for the record, that better approach is what they're looking at with ITS - a side lifting body heat shield with base thrusters for landing. The latter spreads the heat out over a much larger area (Dragon 2 had no option for that because it had no giant, partially empty propellant tanks attached) and increases the length of time over which the heating occurs, slowing the rate.
It'll be interesting to see their changes to ITS. I'm glad to see that "smaller" is among them - I like ambition, but ITS was a step too far, IMHO.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
That's the thing I don't get. SpaceX is saving the US government huge amounts of money. Yet so many Slashdotters have this weird conception that they're a giant leach sucking government budgets dry. Their conception is precisely the opposite of reality. ULA has been getting an unbelievable sweetheart deal for government launches, getting paid even when they don't launch anything, and charging massive fees when they do, while also getting government subsidy to develop new craft. SpaceX paid back its COTS funding in spades versus what was being doled out to ULA.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
If you think SpaceX has only made one landing, you haven't been following things well, landings are pretty close to routine now (unless the mission is for a payload heavier than anything short of a delta heavy can handle, and they're rivaling that, the Falcon heavy will be able to handle payloads over double the max that a delta heavy can do)
You ask if it's reproducable, they've landed about a dozen first stages, (7 so far this year)
they've had two first stages that they've flown and landed twice, and one dragon capsule that's flown and landed twice.
They are on track to have about 20 'flight tested' first stages by the end of the year, and either late this year or early next year are planning to land, refuel and refly a first stage with a 24 hour turnaround.
Right, so you apparently think there was just some printed list sitting around of what NASA will and won't accept when you want to do something that's not been done before (propulsive crew landing)? As was made abundantly clear, what NASA will and won't accept came out of discussions with NASA. It became increasingly clear over time that they weren't going to allow it, so they cut it. I'm sure that you and your army of space psychics could have handled it better.
Yeah, let's just go back to Redstones. Because that will surely lead us to the future that SpaceX is working to achieve! The whole point is to innovate in ways that can make access to space cheaper and more routine, not to keep repeating what we know doesn't allow for cheap, routine access to space.
I love this double talk that you get from Slashdotters. On one hand, bringing a brand new mode of transportation from almost nothing to huge demand, to the degree that each new model is produced is in volumes an order of magnitude than the previous and yet accumulates even greater waiting lists, isn't happening nearly fast enough, that Tesla is "low sales" (actually, no, they're not, not when you take into account market segment). On the other hand, we're also always flooded with posts about how Tesla isn't paying dividends and keeps having to take capital rounds. So let me get this straight, Slashdot. Tesla is supposed to have, in a decade, gone from "design concept for an electric car" to "selling more cars than the major automakers", of an entirely different type of vehicle, while paying dividends and not raising capital. Am I understanding this correctly?
Tesla's rate of growth has been phenomenal. The fact that you find an automaker going from almost nothing to opening up factory lines to produce hundreds of thousands of $35k+ vehicles per year in under a decade to be way to slow, boggles the mind.
For decades, US launch costs had stagnated. In the matter of a few years, SpaceX cut them to a small fraction of their former value - and they've only barely just started reuse. Again, the fact that you find this to be "not really achieving much" and that you think NASA would have done better (despite decades of distinctly not doing better) likewise boggles the mind.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
SpaceX isn't really such a good counter to that. They benefitted from around a century of government research into rocketry, aerospace and space flight, as well as lots of government subsidies. Their biggest customer is one of the biggest governments in the world. And although they're doing it in very innovative ways, they're serving a pretty well-established market.
And, most particularly, they leveraged NASA funding to build the Falcon-9.
To his credit, Musk doesn't ever try to hide that-- he clearly and directly acknowledges NASA's help. In interviews, he points out that after Space-X failed on their first three launches, NASA was the only one willing to invest in them, and they would have gone bankrupt without it.
In fact, SpaceX may have found the right middle ground -- working with NASA changed them from a company with a record of a string of failures to a company with a record of a sting of successes, but they are separated from NASA enough that they can try cool stuff without too long a string of regulations and reviews. Good for them.
They're still working with NASA. Let's hope they can keep that middle ground, distant enough to be innovative, close enough to be rigorous.