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SpaceX plans to debut Red Dragon with 2018 Mars mission
- soperj 11y agoI wonder if they'll send another to Europa in 2019(Feb 28). (http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EJ.htm http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EJ.htm) that's the next closest launch window that FH can make it to after the April 30th 2018 Launch window to Mars
- greglindahl 11y agoHere's an example of a proposed mission to Mars using Falcon Heavy and Dragon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_%28spacecraft%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_%28spacecraft%29
- dmritard96 11y agoSo who all needs to sign off on something like this? Whoever's air space you are in at launch seems like one, perhaps that means a few different countries. Anyone else?
- JshWright 11y agoAll of SpaceX's launch sites are in the US (in fact, the two active sites are on ranges owned by the US Air Force). Their rockets (like all US based orbital rockets) are launched over the ocean, and are well into 'space' before they fly over any other countries.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- soperj 11y agoElon is usually pretty ambitious in his timing, but even if this happens before 2020, that's incredible.
- JshWright 11y agoWell, if it happens before 2020, it'll be in 2018. That's just how the orbits line up (the next window is late spring 2018, with summer 2020 being the window after that).
- gozur88 11y agoGiven SpaceX's inability to estimate time frames (the F9 Heavy is, what, four years late?), I would be shocked if this happened at all, let alone before 2030.
- phpnode 11y agoFalcon Heavy is late, but making Falcon Heavy economical means making all of the 3 F9 first stages it uses reusable. They haven't cracked that yet, they've got 2 good landings and a lot of data, but it's far from certain whether e.g. the landing attempt next week will be successful. Most of their customers do not need the extra payload / push of Falcon Heavy and so they're concentrating on making F9 itself work first. This is reasonable I think.
- gozur88 11y agoOh, I understand the reasons for the delay, and they're good reasons. I was just pointing out they tend to miss their time estimates by a wide margin.
- JshWright 11y agoI'm right there with you on SpaceX and timelines (my recent post history here includes trying to convince folks that just because they landed a stage doesn't mean cheap and easy rocket reuse is right around the corner). In this case however, my gut feeling is that they're a lot deeper into the development cycle of this project and they feel pretty confident about the 2018 timeframe.
- gozur88 11y ago
- aerovistae 11y agoSo exciting watching SpaceX work. I wish other companies would take a cue from them and be as transparent about their goals and progress. Makes SpaceX 100x more fascinating than ULA and other competitors. Who needs a marketing team when you can casually throw out your plans to go to another planet within a few years and have people know you mean it? Moreover, who would go to work for a competitor when one company is heading to Mars and the competition is . . . not doing anything, really. How can ULA hire anyone beyond third-pick candidates?
- Torkel 11y agoI agree - SpaceX is incredible! They capture the imagination and hopes of our time. They stand for making our dreams come true. I used to watch the live-blogs and then livestreams of Steve Jobs when he delivered his keynotes. It felt like seeing and hearing the future. Every new announcement was thrilling and exciting. These days it's SpaceX's launches that gives me a similar feeling. A feeling of seeing and being part of something truly important. If another company communicated in the exact same way it wouldn't be the same, because the story and the sense of importance just isn't there. I could imagine something similar being done in AI, robotics, prolongation of life, clean energy. But to be as great as SpaceX is, I think the mission needs to be something that resonates with us as being profoundly important. Maybe someone wants to call me out and say that Apples products under Steve Jobs were not that important. But I'd say they were. iPhone, iPad - they changed our world. It's just now we've gotten used to it. I hope we'll one day get as used to people living on Mars! :)
- erikpukinskis 11y agoIn what sense is SpaceX profoundly important to you? It's profoundly exciting for sure... Mars will be the best reality tv show ever. It's hard for me to see it as important though, except as marketing for science education. Is that what you're thinking of? I guess I'm asking because sometimes people seem to act like SpaceX is of humanitarian importance and I just can't see that. Not compared to like 10 other immediate existential threats to humanity anyway.
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- ChuckMcM 11y agoInteresting, tweet. I suppose if its an unmanned Dragon with just instruments or something, and they execute flawlessly on Falcon Heavy, and they catch a break in terms of getting the landing stuff qualified. That has to be an extremely aggressive schedule with no margin for error.
- btkramer9 11y agoI hope they would fill it with resources future settlers could use. More realistic too. Although, I could understand keeping it empty in order to maximize the success rate.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoGiven Elon's sense of humor I'm guessing these 'red dragons' would have a bunch of instruments to insure the mission success and collect data on the environment around them, and to have something like several boxes of vegetable seeds or hard candy. Basically something that a future visitor would enjoy having and might not have thought to bring along. If he was a fan of the Martian if could be a flash drive with movies and music.
- sitkack 11y agoI'd at least put a Voyager style gold record in it, incase it is the only other large payload we land there.
- 11thEarlOfMar 11y agoThe interesting question to me personally is the political one. The 'Moon Treaty' [0] apparently is a failure. Is Musk on record anywhere about 'ownership', 'rights', 'obligations' of those exploring, colonizing and profiting from Mars? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty
- randommodnar 11y agoAnybody who knows anything about human behaviour will know that it was a failure from the beginning. If there is strong demand for the resources in the moon, powerful people will move in and take them. Watch what will happen with the Arctic as its oil becomes more accessible. A law or treaty is only as good as its enforcement mechanism.
- LyndsySimon 11y agoIf there is only one entity capable of reaching the place, I'm not sure pre-existing treaties and such have any relevance.
- rbanffy 11y agoBeing able to bomb a place is much easier than being able to land a human crew safely and establishing a colony or mining operation.
- brooklyndavs 11y agoThey still have relevance. Lets take the Antartica treaty for example. Lets, for the sake of argument, say only one entity has the knowledge, resources, etc to reach Antartica and this entity is a subsidiary of BP. BP-Antartica lets say. BP-Antartica wants to drill for oil. This would still be a violation of international law under the treaty that governs Antartica. Same thing applies, or should apply to SpaceX or any other entity (public or private) with regard to any existing and future space treaties. "International law identifies Antarctica and outer space as two of four global commons (the others being the high seas and the atmosphere). Both have been defined within international regimes as spaces outside the territory of nation states and beyond the normative inhabitable zones of the human species. In both instances the current governance regime were outcomes of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957-1958)." http://phys.org/news/2015-08-antarctica-key-space.html http://phys.org/news/2015-08-antarctica-key-space.html Specifically in the Antartica treaty: "No acts or activities taking place while the present Treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica or create any rights of sovereignty in Antarctica. No new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica shall be asserted while the present Treaty is in force." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
- lorenzhs 11y agoExciting news! The Dragon capsule, using drag and retro-thrusters to decelerate, could even land at much higher elevations than previous Mars missions using parachutes for breaking. There also was the idea to use it for sample return missions, not sure what became of that. EDIT: Seems to be planned for 2022 at the earliest, see http://www.space.com/30504-spacex-red-dragon-mars-sample-return.html http://www.space.com/30504-spacex-red-dragon-mars-sample-ret...
- soperj 11y agoLooks like the best date is April 30th 2018. http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EMa.htm http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EMa.htm
- DavidSJ 11y agoThat site says it assumes circular and coplanar orbits for Earth and Mars. I'm guessing it also assumes a Hohmann transfer for the spacecraft. All three of those assumptions could affect the optimal departure date by weeks.
- ck2 11y agoI want to live long enough to see a Tesla rover being driven on Mars.
- kilroy123 11y agoI really really want to see us go to Mars. I want to see humanity become a multi-planet species and eventually have a colony on Mars. Still, I have to point out and ask, what the hell is the financial incentive for SpaceX to go to Mars? This is still a private business, with investors! What money will be made from this?
- vocatus_gate 11y agoNot everything in life is because of financial incentive. Some people are driven by ideology, desire to do good, desire to accomplish something for the first time, etc.
- cryptoz 11y agoMusk has suggested that a Mars colony is most viable if you can sell tickets at a market price of about $500,000. Or rather, that a mid-to-upper class family in California might decide to move to Mars instead of buying a house on Earth. I've seen estimates that would place the number of early potential customers at 80,000[1]. So one very large revenue stream will be direct ticket sales to people like me. Another early revenue stream will be science done and paid for by governments, universities, etc. There will eventually be a Martian economy, and SpaceX will be well-suited to earning money from the colonies [2]. There will be lots of ways to make lots of money if you have a thriving Mars colony with millions of people moving there and a constant supply of materials going both directions. [1]: So that's people that will be able to afford to go in 20 years and who also want to move to Mars. [2]: How much value has America created since it was a colony? Sure, Britain didn't actually earn that money itself since there was a war over it - but establishing colonies in "new worlds" does seem like it could be a very profitable venture.
- overcast 11y agoYes, but who in their right mind would choose to leave beautiful California, to live in desolation on Mars? Sure it's important to explore new worlds, but expecting a family to pack up and leave this world for one with absolutely nothing sounds a bit far fetched.
- cmsmith 11y agoI guess this means they're taking a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" attitude towards planetary protection? Musk is on the record as not being worried about contaminating Mars with Earth life, and it seems like a 2 year time frame wouldn't give them time to put together a JPL-style clean room operation. Is there anything that NASA could/would do to stop them from landing a 'dirty' Dragon on Mars?
- marricks 11y agoWell, "SpaceX has entered into an agreement with NASA for a Dragon mission to Mars[...]" so it seems like if NASA had strong requirements for cleanliness they would request SpaceX follow them.
- T-A 11y agoThe article says they are doing this with NASA, carrying instrumentation of unspecified origin. My guess: SpaceX hands a Dragon to NASA which sterilizes and outfits it with instrumentation and then hands it, enclosed, back to SpaceX to launch.
- j1vms 11y agoFor all the good SpaceX is doing (and it is great indeed), has Musk taken steps to prevent his company from turning into essentially the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in say 50 or 100 years from now? A question made partly in jest of course. I guess a response would include Musk's well-known fears of AI, though I don't recall him stating he is afraid of out-of-control private interests with respect to interplanetary exploration and colonization.
- bovermyer 11y agoI dunno, if it gets us off this rock, I'd be willing to put up with a Weyland-Yutani.
- exit 11y agobecause you want immense suffering to expand outward undefinitely, instead of being confined to one dot where there's a hopeful chance of it being put out?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deedubaya 11y ago> immense suffering to expand outward undefinitely Reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw around the 2:30 mark.
- blacksmith_tb 11y agoCertainly one possible way human suffering might be "put out" on this pale blue dot is by the extinction of H. sapiens, either by our killing ourselves off, or by some kind of serious natural catastrophe (large meteorite strike, supervolcano, etc.). So I'd suggest that it would be better to colonize the solar system before we make whatever developmental leaps that could let us transcend suffering. Otherwise we may never get the chance.
- qaq 11y agoOK after establishing Mars colony, what's next for Elon? Interstellar travel?
- wilonth 11y agoHe's already in his forties, he would go straight to terraforming Mars if he could, but I suppose building a Mars colony in his working lifetime is difficult already. p.s: I hope I could somehow become good enough to build on his legacy
- geoelectric 11y agoMaybe I'm just too much of a Varley fan, but I was really hoping for "Red Thunder."
- TorKlingberg 11y agoCool! Has SpaceX published any plans for how to return from Mars? I am not trying to be critical, it would just be interesting to see their ideas.
- dannygarcia 11y agoPerhaps something involving potatoes.
- rst 11y agoThere's been no detailed presentation of the whole Mars architecture; Musk has promised to present at least an overview this September at the International Astronautical Conference. In the meantime, it's known that there's a high-performance methane-fueled engine in development as part of the project ("Raptor"), with some component tests already underway at test facilities, and several dropped hints about components (including rockets substantially more powerful than the Saturn V used for Apollo lunar missions), but not enough publicly released to determine much about how operations would work.
- akita-ken 11y agoAs rst has mentioned, details on how the Red Dragon would return from the Martian surface have so far been quite sketchy. However, the basic outline for a proposed sample return mission involves having a Mars Ascent Vehicle pop off the top of the Red Dragon capsule to get the payload into low Mars orbit. Once there it jettisons the ascent stage and ignites a second stage to place it into a trajectory for trans-Earth injection. Essentially, it's packing a small two-stage rocket for the trip home. [1] It'll be interesting to find out if the payload capacity of the MAV is actually enough for a crewed capsule to be launched to rendezvous with an orbiting vessel (a la The Martian), or if that would require a much larger descent vehicle in the first place. [1] http://www.space.com/24984-spacex-mars-mission-red-dragon.html http://www.space.com/24984-spacex-mars-mission-red-dragon.ht...
- Ankaios 11y agoThat isn't a SpaceX concept—it was proposed by some NASA people.
- Animats 11y agoOK, so SpaceX want to get NASA to pay for this. Is that in NASA's budget? 2018 with a Falcon Heavy is optimistic. The first flight of the Falcon Heavy isn't expected until 2017. Last year, the first flight was scheduled for spring 2016, but it's slipped to the "end of 2016", which means 2017 in SpaceX time. Space-X needs to get those paid Falcon 9 launches going faster. That's the revenue generator. They're a year behind on launches, and they've been losing unhappy customers to Arianespace. The Brownsville launch site project is way behind schedule; they're building on sandy soil (what did they expect on the east coast of Texas?) and have delayed a year or two for soil compaction. It's great to have an ambitious program, but the profitable products have to ship.
- dsp1234 11y agoOK, so SpaceX want to get NASA to pay for this. Is that in NASA's budget? as was noted in another comment[0]: “We’re particularly excited about an upcoming SpaceX project that would build upon a current ‘no-exchange-of-funds’ agreement we have with the company,” noted NASA deputy Administrator Dava Newman. “In exchange for Martian entry, descent, and landing data from SpaceX, NASA will offer technical support for the firm’s plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars.” SpaceX gets expertise and technical support, and NASA gets data. This isn't a normal contract where NASA is paying with cash. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583770
- iwwr 11y agoHowever you go about it, you need access to the Deep Space Network for telemetry and communication.
- peter303 11y agoNow watch Bezos do some spectacular moonshot to beat Musk.
- zspade 11y agoIf SpaceX Succeeds at this, we're going to have to update that term...
- AYBABTME 11y agoI've always been wondering if it's even possible for non US residents to work there.
- T-A 11y agoBrowse their job listings and you will see this: "To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State." [1] Some background here: https://www.quora.com/Can-a-person-of-non-U-S-citizenship-get-a-job-as-an-engineer-scientist-in-any-of-the-aerospace-defence-companies-in-the-US-like-NASA-L-M-A-SpaceX-etc https://www.quora.com/Can-a-person-of-non-U-S-citizenship-ge... [1] http://www.spacex.com/careers/position/8316 http://www.spacex.com/careers/position/8316
- perilunar 11y agoI don't understand why Musk is so focused on a Mars Colony. Why go to all the effort of climbing out of one gravity well just to drop yourself down another? It be a lot easier to mine asteroids and build colonies in Earth or solar orbit. And potentially hugely profitable if they choose a platinum-rich asteroid. See further: 'The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space' by Gerard K. O'Neill 'Mining the Sky' by John S. Lewis