SpaceX: We'll land on Mars in 2018 (cough, with NASA's help) SpaceX, a rocket upstart known for making bold promises, has announced its intention to send one of its Dragon capsules to Mars in two years. 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 This …
Never mind the scientific payload, never mind the instrumentation, never mind going to the Moon first.
The REAL question is (SpaceX fanbois will love this), will there be a big wheel of cheese in the capsule when it lands?
A big piece of cheese in a 'First!' achievement isn't tradition, but by cracky, let's make it one!
He's not doing this because it is easy. He's doing it because he wants to put a million people on Mars and he sees this as a necessary step. He is probably one of those people who see the Moon as a distraction.
That said, if he did want a Moon landing he could do it virtually any time the rocket is ready. With a Mars landing, he is restricted to a launch window of a few months every 24 years. If he's not ready in 2018, he'll have to wait until 2020. Making the announcement now is making a commitment to hitting the earlier launch window, which conditions the timetable of all the SpaceX activities leading up to that.
The rules apply to planets much further away than Mars, but they probably only apply to companies that operate in the US, or use banks that deal with the US, or send e-mail through servers in places that deal with the US. :-/
XKCD, as usual, deals with this well:
[quote]Spacecraft carry bacteria, although we do our best to sterilize them before and during launch. This sterilization is important, because we don't want to contaminate another planet or Moon with Earth bacteria. There are two big reasons for this—one ethical and one practical. The ethical one is that we don't want to accidentally introduce Earth life that disrupts and/or destroys a native ecosystem. The practical one is that if we find life on some other planet, we don't want to have to struggle to figure out whether it was contamination from one of our probes.
But sterilizing spacecraft is hard. NASA has an employee specifically assigned to this task, and she has possibly the best job title of all time: Planetary Protection Officer.[/quote]
There's also a reference somewhere to the fact that the Planetary Protection Strategy for most launches is 'try not to hit any planets'
> Is he going to melt the ice-caps? Seriously?
Musk did mention an idea to continuously detonate nukes above the Martian poles, to create two temporary 'suns'. Was he serious? I don't know. My assumption was that it would be pointless trying to create an atmosphere on Mars without a magnetosphere to protect it from solar wind, but then Musk has access to people a million times more expert than myself. If someone can point me towards an informed online discussion on this subject, I'd be grateful.
Surprisingly, some of the homework for creating what is in effect a magazine-fed nuke gun has already been done for Project Orion - the idea of launching a massive spacecraft from Earth by firing a nuclear bomb behind it every second.
http://mashable.com/2015/10/02/elon-musk-nuke-mars-two-suns/#nWFrq_I7Vqqh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Having worked on a Mars mission in the past I had to take part in the Planetary Protection course at ESA. It's very interesting, but bloody hard (and expensive) to achieve the levels of cleanliness you need, I can assure you. But just to correct one thing, the reason for Planetary Protection is not to protect potential life on other planets or to stop contamination of other planets, but its purely there to protect future science missions. i.e. making sure that when a future mission declares that they have found XYZ, then there is no doubt that they actually have found native XYZ, and not XYZ coming from a previous mission. (XYZ could be life, water, organic materials, titanium deposits or whatever). No one wants to have to send up 3 or 4 missions to confirm they have found something just because someone earlier might have screwed up.
That's the real reason, the protecting of other potential lifeforms and prevention of contamination is really just a side benefit.
Mind you, if I ever get on another interplanetary mission then I'm stealing that Interplanetary Genocide line. Brilliant! :P
So according to the sarcastic rover, the capule will be empty.
Why?
If you're going to the trouble of landing it gently on Mars, and you already know that you intend to send further missions including people, why not pack to the gills with stuff that might be useful for those future missions?
A manned mission would require a much larger spacecraft, so the addition of what little you could fit in this Dragon module won't be super helpful. Then you have the problem of the retrieving whatever useful gear the dragon is loaded with - a manned mission might land dozens or hundreds of miles away.
I'm sympathetic to your point though... how about some scientific equipment, or a rover?
>as many rolls of gaffer tape as will fit!! And a few packs of chewing gum and maybe a ball of string for good measure.
According to 1950s Sci Fi B-movies, it's the underwires from ladies' bras that are used to fix some critical machine, for some odd reason. It would seem technology has moved on since then!.
I am sure you are not really taking the current reporting literally and make a valid point.
I think it would be safe to say that some significant science will be planned and conducted.
To mimic a realistic atmospheric entry it makes a lot of sense to reflect the likely mass of a manned attempt. No doubt there will be multiple projects vying to be payload, probably funded and therefore making a valid business case for Space X's proposition. If the payload supports future missions then all the better.
They are a commercial business after all.
> "a guy I worked with put a note inside the Viking lander the night before launch and after it had been decontaminated that said "made by Sanchez"."
Ah, but what you don't know is that I was waiting in the shadows, and after Sanchez left I took the liberty of editing that note, pointing out the pivotal role played by Big Johns thruout history.
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