Mars One Plans Lander on Red Planet in 2016
Mars One Founder Bas Lansdorp says his organization is looking for experiments to fly on an unmanned lander that it will launch to the Red Planet in 2016.
Mars One will send “a small craft that will demonstrate the technologies we need for our human colony” and is inviting partners to join the mission…
The first step is to test whether conditions for sustaining humans can be created, by sending experimental systems on a lander.
“If you have a reason to get something to Mars, get in touch with me,” Lansdorp told the conference.
“It could be a country that wants to do an experiment on Martian soil.
“I know the UK space agency has been interested in getting to Mars in the past. They could put something on our lander and get a payload there.
“We also have consumer firms that are interested in becoming ‘the first brand on Mars’.”
Another idea is to allow a “high schools payload” similar to the recent Youtube Space Lab.
Building a Martian lander typically takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars. To send one during the next launch window, which runs from January to April 2016, the mission would almost have to be in an advanced state of planning and development by now.
Lansdrop said full details of the mission would be revealed in December.
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15 responses to “Mars One Plans Lander on Red Planet in 2016”
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The only system that has a hope of demonstarating the ability to land people and equipment on Mars is Red Dragon.
Personally I would prefer to see something more in line with a composite deep space cargo/crew ship on regular earth/Mars run with a seperate Mars Lander/Launcher such as envisaged by Morpheous. But Dragon is the only system that isi near human rated designed to land on Mars and has any hope of being ready by 2016.
Dragon landing on Mars is one way at the oment but I suppose that may suit Mars One but I would prefer a method where Mars could get back into space from the surface, they would be closer the the asteroid belt after all and could be a usefull staging base and source of O2 and CH4.
A full-up Falcon Heavy can get 13.2tonnes to Mars. Allowing half that for Dragon and payload leaves 6.5 tonnes for course adjustment propulsion and “slowing down” systems – seems unlikely to me that a 6+ tonne Dragon could slow down and land using only heat-shield, parachutes and SuperDracos – but if anyone knows better, please correct me.
Anyhow, from a Mars One perspective, such a mission might be plausible from a hardware point of view, but decidedly high-risk – but then any Mars mission without a propulsive deceleration (preferably into orbit) is going to be high-risk. And will Mars One have the $200,000,000 for the mission hardware by 2016? – or can they negotiate a SpaceX discount?. And even if they get the hardware paid for, what about mission control expenses?. Obviously, their plan was to hope to excite interest enough to get one or more sponsors – both financial and technical.
Not sure what your interest is in the asteroid belt – please explain.
the figure i’ve most commonly seen cited at various places on the internet is that the Falcon Heavy / Dragon could put 1 ton of payload on Mars. However, since 1. the FH hasn’t launched yet, and 2. SpaceX is developing a new upper stage with better flight performance in vacuum, and 3. we haven’t seen the Dragon demonstrate propulsive landing capabilities, that number is definitely going to change. there are too many variables that are still unknown.
Wikipedia gives the dry mass of Dragon as 4.2tonnes. I was allowing as increase for the SuperDraco system up to 5.5tonnes, plus a payload of 1 tonne. In truth I was arbitrarily dividing the 13tonnes in half, since accurate figures are not available from SpaceX.
Also, FH is very likely to fly in 2014 and its questionable whether Raptor will be available by early 2016. Also, there’s no reason to believe that the SuperDraco propulsive landing capability of DragonRider/Dragon2/Red-Dragon shouldn’t work (especially at 0.376g) and be in use by 2016.
Whether or not the FH/Red-Dragon landscape changes between now and then, such a system is at least plausible for consideration at this time. Although that does not be mean that SpaceX would be willing to support such a mission, even if Mars One has the where with all to organise and, somewhat more doubtfully, pay for it.
yeah, the lack of solid numbers from SpaceX hampers the guesswork considerably. i agree that it is very plausible, and indeed, that it is probably the only way that Mars One could be able to pull off this precursor mission. i’ve always thought their schedule was overly ambitious.
i’m looking forward to the FH launch in 2014. i might even make the trip to Vandenberg to see it, if it’s not on a day i have to work.
One ton to Mars surface has been done successfully by Atlas 5. I don’t know what the real figure is for Falcon Heavy but it’s certainly more than one ton.
Atlas V has upper stages that burn liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which has a higher ISP in vacuum than the RP-1 / LOX that the SpaceX upper stage has. It can deliver larger payloads to Mars due to that boost in efficiency in vacuum operations.
Red Dragon has been proposed by others to NASA, see Wikipedia, As to achieving 2016 well I said it was the only system that had a hope not that it was a sure thing.
As for the Asteroid belt, Mars is closer from a distance and velocity perspective and if you have an anomaly on orbital insertion the chances of causing a big problem on Mars is less than if you hit earth so it would make a great place to practice getting asteroids into orbit and extracting resources.
I would prefer a proper deep space craft made of multiple modules doing earth-mars round trips than a one way single module trip but I do not have the cash to pay for what I want.
wikipedia: “It is calculated that its own drag may slow the capsule sufficiently for the remainder of descent to be within the retro-propulsion thruster capabilities”
So looks like my caution may be unjustified.
I think any asteroid capture to Mars orbit would be from orbit crossing asteroids, not from the asteroid belt – that is a very long haul from Mars, even if it its closer than from Earth.
“I would prefer a proper deep space craft made of multiple modules doing earth-mars round trips than a one way single module trip but I do not have the cash to pay for what I want.”
Surely if you made one or two lifestyle compromises you could scrape enough together. Tell you what, if you pay for it, I’ll knock up a mission design on the back of an old envelope. First thought: how about building the spacecraft out of empty beer cans? – got to be worth a try!.
I will start on the beer can supply, not sure on the life support, power gen, waste heat disposal and propulsion systems though. It is probably about as likely as Mars one getting a mission to mars by 2016.
I’ll be impressed if they land a simulated mission in the Kerbal Space Program. For myself, I think that is about as far as they are going to get. 2016 is incredibly ambitious. Actually landing something on Mars is something that even unmanned spacecraft has a very spotty record for experienced agencies that literally have the brightest people and essentially unlimited budgets (relatively speaking compared to a commercial enterprise depending on merchandise from their website to finance their projects) to see that they happen.
They may just surprise me, so I’ll entertain the possibility they may actually get their act together. None the less I agree with the sentiment of extreme skepticism.
Couldn’t have put it better myself
Hilarious. Wishful thinking to the extreme. Sad really.
You never know, they might suddenly score a big advertising sponsor: Red Bull, Coca-Cola, ??. Didn’t microsoft have a billion dollar advertising budget for win8, or Apple’s advertising budget for ipads. Corporations do spend lots and lots on advertising. A few photos of products and/or logos on Mars might be considered a justifiable spend. Once there’s the possibility of money on the table from an interested sponsor, then NASA or ESA or/and other research organisations may pitch in with technical help and maybe additional funding. The chance of getting experiments to Mars piggy-backed on another mission might seem quite attractive to space agencies, governments and research institutes. Once the ball is rolling, there’s the possibility of SpaceX discount, mission control contributions, etc.. They just need a lucky break.
That said, even if the luckiest of lucky breaks happens tomorrow, an early 2016 launch window is a tough ask. As a wise sage once said: “Wishful thinking to the extreme.”
That number appears to be just donations to Mars one from the portal on the website. it definitely doesn’t cover the money they took in from the applications to join Mars One, or any other corporate donations.