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SpaceX informed NASA of slowdown in its commercial Mars program
Confirming rumors and suspicions that SpaceX is adjusting its plans to begin dispatching robotic landers to Mars, NASA officials said the commercial space company has informed the agency that it has put its Red Dragon program on the back burner.
Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement between NASA and SpaceX, the government agreed to provide navigation and communications services for the Red Dragon mission, which originally aimed to deliver an unpiloted lander to Mars in 2018. SpaceX confirmed earlier this year the launch of the experimental lander on a Falcon Heavy rocket had slipped to 2020. But Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and chief executive, said last month that the company is redesigning its next-generation Dragon capsule, a craft designed to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, to do away with the capability for propulsive, precision helicopter-like landings as originally envisioned. Returning space crews will instead splash down in the ocean under parachutes.
[...] Musk wrote in a tweet that SpaceX has not abandoned supersonic retro-propulsion at Mars. "Plan is to do powered landings on Mars for sure, but with a vastly bigger ship," he tweeted last month after the announcement that SpaceX is omitting the propulsive landing capability on the Crew Dragon.
Musk said his team at SpaceX is refining how the company could send people to Mars, eventually to settle there. He revealed a Mars transportation architecture in a speech at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, last year, but the outline has since changed. A vision for gigantic interplanetary transporters Musk presented last year has been downsized, he said. Musk said he will unveil the changes during a presentation in September at this year's International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
Previously: NASA to Take a Supportive Role in SpaceX's Red Dragon Mars Mission
Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan
SpaceX Appears to Have Pulled the Plug on its Red Dragon Plans
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @02:12PM
No they're magnitudes easier because they have fairly stable conditions, don't have to bring their own oxidizer, and their vast majority of their flight is maintained through lift, [mostly] never have to deal with supersonic velocities, have relative consistence of temperatures, are [relatively] feather weight, and so much more.
Rockets, particularly now that reuse is likely to become the standard, have to tolerate extreme conditions on completely opposite ends. Enormous pressure, 0 pressure, enormous heat, the freezing cold of space, and more. And their thrust is all they have to bring them up with rockets generally having about an order of magnitude greater thrust behind them compared to something like a 747. And if anything goes wrong in a rocket there's a very good chance of an extreme event. Airplanes by contrast are very failure tolerant.