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Elon Musk: SpaceX's Mars Rocket Could Fly Short Flights By Next Year
On stage at SXSW, Elon Musk issued yet another incredibly ambitious timeline. During a Q&A session on Sunday, Musk said SpaceX will be ready to fly its Mars rocket in 2019. He said: We are building the first ship, or interplanetary ship, right now, and we'll probably be able to do short flights, short up and down flights, during the first half of next year. Further reading: Fortune.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary
To be fair here.. Musk is describing TESTING of the spacecraft by sending it on short flights, near earth. This makes sense. You crawl, walk and THEN run.
You really don't want to commit a group of people to a year long voyage to Mars and back in an untested spacecraft. You want to make sure the spacecraft isn't going to kill it's occupants because of some unfixable systems failure. So, you test it in orbit, short trips around the moon and THEN commit to a Mars round trip.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Easy.. it's the rocket they're building to go to mars. It's not an alpha centauri rocket.. it's a mars rocket. And in order to test it out they will do short flights with it.
So.. they're doing short flights with a mars rocket.
Simple.
Was the Lunar module not a lunar module when it was just sent up to orbit the earth in Apollo 5?
Was the descent stage of the LM not a descent stage because it stayed in lunar orbit during Apollo 8?
This is the BFS ship which will ride on the BFR rocket for Earth to Mars launches, but also able to do SSTO in Mars gravity for the return trip.
They are going to be doing short (2-3 miles up) test SSTO-style launches (and landings) either at Boca Chica or from ship-to-ship by the end of next year. Most of the people who have been working on FH have been reassigned to work on BFR/BFS exclusively.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you really want to be fair, you can say in this case Musk's approach is to crawl, announce that you're going to win the marathon 12 months from now, walk and then run.
FTFY.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Except that JFK and Obama's projects were by the government.
Trump has nothing to do with that private enterprises do.
#DeleteFacebook
Of humanity being wiped out entirely and in so many different ways. No generation before us lived with that fear...
You must be young, given you believe that.
#DeleteChrome
He already owns the most powerful rocket on the planet, so he's won a marathon. This is about plans for the next one.
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The story is irritatingly vague on this point, but a previous comment by Musk makes it clearer:
Will be starting with a full-scale Ship doing short hops of a few hundred kilometers altitude and lateral distance [...] Those are fairly easy on the vehicle, as no heat shield is needed, we can have a large amount of reserve propellant and don't need the high area ratio, deep space Raptor engines.
He's talking about only the upper stage of the BFR - the spaceship part that actually goes to Mars and back - taking off under its own power and doing a little hop through the atmosphere. That's much less ambitious than even the first step you listed, testing in orbit. But it's something fundamental that should be done first, and it's basic enough that it might just be possible on this sort of timeline (within 21 months). Even if the spaceship could lift a few metres off the pad, hover for a few seconds under control, then land softly, that would be a solid result.
Trump canceled the Mars program and is aiming for the moon. And personally I don't remember when Obama talked about trains, so it clearly wasn't a big deal -- California voters and Jerry Brown are the ones who pushed for trains.
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"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
-- Douglas Adams
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You've got it backwards
Someone's got a formula one car and they're testing it by driving it down a runway and you're jumping up and down saying "How the fuck can you call that a formula one car when you're not racing it in a formula one event?!?"
For all that it's really cool, Falcon 9 Heavy might have been a mistake. And this is from someone who went to the launch and paid $200 for the good tickets. It cost them a great deal to get working, and is destined to be supersceded by their next rocket. We might not see that many of them ever fly.
The thing is, I'm not sure you can build the BFR without building the Falcon Heavy. It tests a lot of things about combining more engines together, which Musk noted was a lot harder than anticipated just making the FH... I think you need something like the FH doing repeated flights to get enough data to build a BFR that is more like to work than not.
So I don't really see how you can ever call the FH a mistake, even if it is replaced eventually.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And we're seeing how that CA supertrain is doing. My money is on the rocket going to Mars before the train makes it anywhere near Los Angeles.
You really don't want to commit a group of people to a year long voyage to Mars and back in an untested spacecraft.
Depends on who the people are.
Even that's going to be extremely difficult. They're taking a huge gamble on carbon fibre tanks here; cryogenics don't play well with composites, and liquid oxygen doesn't play well with organics in general. Past attempts at composite rockets haven't exactly had a spectacular success record. Even prolongued vacuum exposure is challenging with composites. I understand why they want to use them - the strength to weight ratios are just far too tempting to ignore. But... it's not easy.
I do think they'll be able to get it eventually. Even if they have to coat the whole thing in a layer of CVD ceramic or alumium. The sheer size they're going for makes the mass of coatings less significant (r^2 scaling vs. r^3 scaling).
En route to success, however, I expect at least a couple nice fireballs and some corresponding unfortunate setbacks.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
I'm a fan of Musk, but if you go to their web page, they conveniently omit the Saturn V in their rocket comparison.
The following is from http://www.spacex.com/falcon-h...
"Only the Saturn V moon rocket, last flown in 1973, delivered more payload to orbit"