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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
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)
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.
"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?!?"
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.
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"