SpaceX Announces Plans to Send Dragon to Mars
Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come pic.twitter.com/u4nbVUNCpA
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2016
51 responses to “SpaceX Announces Plans to Send Dragon to Mars”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I will be interested to know how they plan to get that capsule back.
Simple answer: They don’t. 😉
Reckless and senseless waste. 🙁
If Musk’s plans unfold as he hopes, it will go into a museum here…
…or there.
Could you explain why you think that man? I mean, we have already sent a ton of stuff to Mars until now, and nothing has returned. In what way is that reckless and senseless?
Can Falcon Heavy get a Dragon to Mars with enough fuel to land, while recovering some boosters, or will it have to be expendable flight?
A 11-13 tonne TMI will need a lot of power. Not sure about the particular profile that will be used, I am willing to bet though that we are talking about at least an expendable center core mission here.
So likely SpaceX launches this baby on used FH boosters unless they can get someone to pay for a ride??
If Spacex is footing the whole bill I bet they have some miles on a booster or three.
I think the Dragon heatshield is sufficient to slow it significantly into the lower atmosphere. From there it’s may be parachute, but certainly SuperDracos to the surface. A Dragon 2 weighs in at about 6.5 tonnes and FH (based on F9 v1.1 ) can throw 13 tonnes to Mars. A “full-thrust” version, even without cross-feed should be good for the job.
I suspect that the middle 2 cores will be expendable, but I am sure that the side ones can come back.
Still, not sure that it matters.
If SpaceX is footing the bill I’m sure it matters.
All I read was the Twitter feed above and assumed it was manned. He can do whatever he wants with his property.
at some point, he WILL be sending man to the Martian surface via a 1-way trip. that has been his mission all along.
But, nothing reckless not senseless in that.
In fact, it is the SMARTEST thing that we can do.
“assumed it was manned”
Wha?…
Senseless like Spirit, Curiosity or Opportunity that returned thousands of beautiful images from the surface of Mars and provided Gigabytes of scientific data to keep scientists busy for years to come? Yes, exactly that senseless. 😉
huh?
What is this reckless/senseless waste?
The ability to send 2-4 tonnes to the Martian surface for under 150M strikes me as pretty darn good.
And if they launch with used equipment, then it is even cheaper.
I would put money on 2020, when the next set of launch windows rolls around (since the Falcon Heavy delay train shows no signs of slowing down). Still exciting. Hopefully they put some methane-making apparatus on there to prove that concept.
Bet you SPACEX makes the 2018 window 🙂
Not sure I’d bet on it, but they must be confident, simply to have blabbed about it. Nice to have something inspirational to talk/think about though. Apparently, on the day of the launch, ULA executives will be counting their money and shitting on poor people. It’s not a special occasion though, cos it’s what they do do every day.
SpaceX is going to Mars and Boeing SLS and LM Orion are going to Alabama, Colorado and where ever.
I guess once NASA has paid for a Dragon, but doesn’t want to use it again, it makes for a relatively “inexpensive” test of principle. Perhaps the Falcon Heavy used to throw it will also be made up of flight proven cores. If they can get a Dragon landed on Mars, and get some sort of useful video/photos, it would certainly make for some positive media coverage.
The Dragon should be able to land with 2-4 tonnes of cargo and you speak of it getting some ‘useful video/photos’ as though this was sojourner.
LOL.
no doubt, NASA will want to add all sorts of equipment on-board once the first one has gone.
I was speaking of how SpaceX could justify what might seemingly be an expensive “test”. News outlets, TV companies and corporate sponsors could easily make this a money earning, rather than a money losing, venture. The potential science would likely also be valuable, but not necessarily so easily monetised.
Ahh. Got it. Mea culpa.
Why does he have to justify anything to do with Mars? Firstly it’s always been the stated goal of SpaceX to help enable mankind to become an interplanetary species focused on Mars as the first stop and secondly, it’s his company.
Cheers
I mean “justify” as in justify to themselves. It certainly seems like a directly unprofitable test with regard to their normal business. So, any means by which such testing costs could be mitigated can only help the cause. They’re not going “to help enable mankind to become an interplanetary species focused on Mars as the first stop” if they go out of business.
When will we hear the ‘scientific community’ having a fit over how difficult it will be to prevent such a large vehicle from contaminating Mars with Earth organisms? After all only the government has the expertise to do that right… 😉
Jokes aside, “inform overall Mars architecture” is very sensible. Get data and focus on research that may weigh heavily on how the “colonization” plan is structured.
Ugh. I really suspect that this is going to be a battle similar to launching nuke-powered sats.
I wonder if there are plans to use maximal hardware from Dragon to make a ‘generic’ cargo lander with a big front door and a ramp. So long as your stuff fits thru the door, it can be unloaded or unload itself. The first thing I’d send would be a battery powered forklift that would unload its own solar cells to recharge itself and be ready for future cargo to unload.
They just need one of those inflatable ramps that airliners have for evacuation.
why? I would think that said forklift would likely be designed with arms for lifting, moving, manipulating, etc.
Said vehicle could do a lot of work, not just as a mover.
Some more reading on this:
Detailed description of NASA/SpaceX work on mission under Space Act Agreement: http://www.parabolicarc.com…
Video and abstract on NASA 3-year engineer study of Red Dragon: http://www.parabolicarc.com…
Scientific paper on Red Dragon mission: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archiv…
Not being restricted by the necessity to having to do “scientific studies” the real question is where will SpaceX land the Dragon II? My guess, the top of Olympus Mons. Way to go, SpaceX.
I am guessing that SpaceX will be providing loads of space for NASA and other groups to buy. IOW, they will likely send Red Dragons with their cargo and for others.
Big negative in not being able to use the Martian atmosphere to slow down… they’ll need a low-altitude landing site to bleed off as much speed as possible before firing the landing rockets.
Thanks for your reply, Doug. I’m no rocket scientist, but, it seems to me, that it is going to be a trade off between drag and amount of fuel. It could be, and this is just a guess, that it would require much less fuel either to land or eventually take off from the top of Olympus Mons (elevation twenty-two kilometers above surrounding plains). I know that no plans to re-use this vehicle have been mentioned, but, eventually, like way in the future, they may decide to do so. Regards, Paul.
It would require much, much MORE fuel to land on the top of Olympus Mons, because there’s almost no atmosphere to slow down the capsule before it lands.
They’ll want to bleed off as much speed as possible using atmospheric drag (that’s what the heatshield is for) before they fire the landing rockets.
Fair enough, Doug. Regards, Paul.
Also, the radiation at high Martian altitudes is going to be unwelcome. We’re going to need to spend many decades scurrying around the lowlands before we go high altitude sightseeing.
I may be wrong, but I think the engines can also be used to slow Dragon, as well as loiter and manoeuvre before actually touching down. The low Martian g increases considerably the usefulness of the engines as compared to Earth. I think we’re looking at a capability far in advance of a simple sky-crane or New Shepherd like landing – what is needed is genuine lateral “helicopter-like” ability for the last few kilometres of descent before touch down. With variations in the atmospheric density, it will be extremely important to be able to precisely adjust the landing zone or else consecutive and repetitive landings becomes useless. We’re not gonna get far if we keep landing those supplies/people on the other side of those dunes, or behind that mountain, or at the bottom of that crater. Of course, with this being the first attempt, they may not want to be so ambitious. At some point though they will need to demonstrate the flight authority to set down next to the previous landings. Problem is that tests of this sort will not be cheap and opportunities don’t come round every few weeks, as they do for F9 landings, so they got to get as much value as possible from each test attempt. Isn’t it nice to have something exciting to rattle on about?.
The total fuel capacity in Dragon v2 is 400 gallons, according to the FAA’s Environmental Assessment for the DragonFly testing.
I would guess they don’t have enough fuel to loiter over the surface for more than a second or so. Most of the fuel will be expended in slowing down. Yes, there’s some ability to maneuver and adjust trajectory, but that will primarily be done by angling the capsule during re-entry to vary the amount of lift it generates.
For very accurate landings, there will need to be a Martian GPS system in place.
Thanks for your replies, Doug, Michael and Windbourne. Possibly because, as Doug and Michael have both pointed out, that landing upon the top of Olympus Mons would be the most difficult place to land the Dragon II upon the surface of Mars, then that’s exactly where SpaceX should try to land their first (unmanned) spaceship. What a coup. Forever after, if successful, it could be known, especially by the future locals, as SpaceX Mountain. Regards, Paul.
PS I cut short of saying it could be known as Mount Musk. 🙂
It does not have enough fuel – and can not carry enough fuel, even if the interior were completely gutted and filled with fuel – to land on the top of Olympus Mons.
This is not true, dependent on how much velocity they can dump to the atmosphere.
You are correct, and the peak of Olympus Mons is above the majority of the Martian atmosphere. That’s why it’s not possible to land there!!
If a capsule can skip off the atmosphere entirely–and they certainly can–you don’t think you can arbitrarily employ the lift of the capsule to arrive at a point with a certain velocity? Certainly there are limits to what the geometry of a flight profile and the surface will permit, but I don’t see that the top of Olympus Mons can be ruled out without doing that math.
The peak of Olympus Mons is above 88-93% of the Martian atmosphere (the range is due to seasonal variations in Mars’ atmospheric density).
If you want to think that they can bleed off ~6,000 m/s of dV with the heat shield in the thinnest 7-12% of the upper Martian atmosphere, you are free to cling to that fantasy, but in reality the outcome is going to be a crater with tiny bits of Dragon scattered around it.
So you know capsules can skip off the atmosphere entirely, and you don’t realize this involves rising from thicker to thinner atmosphere layers?
Yes it does, but this does not bleed off enough speed for a Dragon v2 to land on the top of Olympus Mons.
cool, but his is no surprise. Elon has said for years that he plans on sending dragon’s to Mars, and people (Companies, organizations, governments,ect) would fill it with whatever they wanted on Mars. He provides the ship, they provide the cargo.
Mars is interesting from a scientific standpoint, but not from a commercial one. While SpaceX is not a publicly traded company, it does have investors that expect healthy returns on their money. If Elon spends time pursuing projects with no short term returns (ie, not something 30 years in the future) he may be asked to step down from management. It’s fine to use Mars “plans” as PR fodder, spending vast bundles of money on hardware and planning is not.
The biggest hurdle with missions to Mars is the wetware. Nothing is known about how well we humans do in a reduced gravity environment for a long period of time. It is known that many health problems occur in 0G. Just ask Scott Kelly (or look up his statements now that he’s back from 300 days on ISS). It may be necessary to build space ships that spin to provide some G so a crew arriving on Mars will be healthy enough to deal with any emergencies and carry out the tasks of commissioning the first base.
A mission to put a colony on the moon is the best first step to learning the lessons that we’ll need to survive on Mars. In fact, the moon is a harder environment to prepare for but still has the advantage that a crew could return to Earth quickly and supplies could be ferried up in a much shorter time frame. The health studies would go a long way to informing whether humans could survive long term on Mars and what types of health issues are likely to crop up.