He plans to follow up from last year’s talk in Guadalajara with an update in Adelaide on Friday. Eric Berger wonders if he’ll explain how he’s going to pay for it. Me too.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Loren Grush has some questions, too. I guess we’ll find out Thursday night.
It was really lame of SpaceX to drop the Red Dragon concept. I put no significance whatsoever on their current Mars plans. I consider it to be pure vaporware at this point.
If they are serious about manned space I think this is a viable workplan:
– Add propulsive landing to Dragon V2.
– Sell manned circumlunar flights on Dragon.
– Build Red Dragon and launch in Falcon 9 Heavy at regular times. Modularize it and sell space in it to interested parties. Similar to NanoRacks business model.
– Reduce the cost of Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy with improved reusability and reduced parts count. Should be relatively easy to do once Raptor is available. Just make engine with twice the thrust of the Merlin and use 5x in the base and 1x on top. Reduces number of engines from 10 to 6 per vehicle on Falcon 9, and from 28 to 16 on Falcon 9 Heavy. Nearly halves the engines to inspect.
– Develop something similar to the Nautilus lunar cruiser from InterPlanetary Ventures. All you need is the Raptor, the Dragon, some habitat modules which can be manufactured using the same technology and tools they use to manufacture the first stage tanks, and some solar panels. Sell cruise trips around the Moon to interested passengers.
– Eventually do manned lunar landings.
– Build depots, way stations, and do manned space flights to either Mars or the Martian Moons with a multiple-launch architecture.
– Once flight volume increases, scale up the Raptor engine once more to have close to twice the thrust, replace Falcon Heavy with a single core design with a larger diameter with 9 first stage engines and 1 upper stage engine. Will require barge transport and different facilities.
IIRC, they dropped Red Dragon because NASA was throwing up roadblocks. Maybe they will come back to it.
The problem with Red Dragon is that it is only good for precursor missions. It carries too few people, unless you can stack them, to bring the cost per seat down to be anything that could be considered affordable. But then again, landing large items on Mars isn’t something we can do right now without seven minutes of terror scenarios.
The price per seat is a bottleneck for tourism too. Prices will be the best they have ever been for governments but even at $5 million a seat + other travel expenses it is still out of reach for many tourists.
Things do look really promising for NASA, other governments, independent researchers, and businesses though. It is pretty amazing to look at what can be done with current or near term technology. Landing on Mars or cruising to the Moon is out of range for civilians but NASA has never had a better opportunity to engage in these activities.
The problem with Dragon is it’s too small to hold enough fuel. ITS is too big. Something in between is the most likely thing to be announced.
So how will Musk pay for development of the Mars rocket? My guess is that SpaceX will follow its tried and true path. There will be some private investment—SpaceX continues to trend upward in private market valuations thanks to its growing dominance in the commercial satellite launch market—but we can expect the company to continue to leverage government contracts as well.
This isn’t wrong but wasn’t part of their plan engaging in other business ventures, like communications, in order to fund the larger mission? Then when it comes to a Mars colony, Musk doesn’t expect to be the only one participating but rather it will be a massive effort from many many different groups.
Paying for it has been my focus. If pet rocks can be sold, so could plots on mars. The problem is finding adults to get anything done.