7 thoughts on “Curiosity On Mars”

  1. We actually have no ability to talk to these things in the dozens. Anyone care to place bets on what happens when SpaceX starts filling deep space with dozens, then hopefully hundreds and thousands of starships? I would bet the community starts off up in arms about all the comms interference, until eventually SpaceX ends up building their own DSN that will make the current one look like a toy.

    And of course, once there are actual people on Mars, all bets in terms of landers/rovers are off, we’ll learn more in the first few months of science after they get established than from every mission to date.

    1. Send a few Starships stuffed with Starlink satellites, plus a larger one with a high-bandwidth transmitter to Earth (lasercomm, if they can work the bugs out). That should fix a lot of the issues. Also, because Mars is smaller and has less gravity AND atmosphere, the satellites can achieve lower latency AND longer lifespans than in LEO.

      Seriously, people need to start thinking about the kinds of things that they might want to pay Elon to ship to Mars, beyond the hand-waved colony development items.

  2. I wonder what it would take to put these into production?

    The biggest hurdle is (of course) the RTG’s, given the severely limited quantity of plutonium NASA has access to. Could JPL redesign it for solar power for the initial batches?

    I take David’s point about the comms limitations, which stretches the DSN to the limit as it is. But then, that is something that is going to have to get beefed up before long anway. A modified Starlink network in Mars orbit for relays certainly could not hurt (and, I expect, is going to happen before too long anyway).

  3. “And of course, once there are actual people on Mars, all bets in terms of landers/rovers are off, we’ll learn more in the first few months of science after they get established than from every mission to date.”

    I’m wondering about the possibility of that first Starship deployment to deploy a whole batch of small helicopter drones to thoroughly survey the surrounding region in greater detail. That could cover a lot more ground, more quickly, for crewed follow-up.

  4. We should be sending dozens of these things. If Starship happens, it will be quite affordable.

    Same for the Moon and we can do it before Starship. Trump and NASA want to do it but who knows if it will happen.

  6. Dozens? Smallthink. We should be sending thousands of semiautonomous rovers. Serpentine robots at that, so they can pack tight and traverse any terrain. Who cares if we lose a few hundred when there’s 5800 more doing their thing?

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