Only 16080 hours left for SpaceX to send Red Dragon to Mars

elon pls

>Just make a big enough rocket and point it at Mars
It's not that simple, friend.

Launching to Mars transfer isn't harder than launching to GTO, maneuvering to hit the atmosphere correctly isn't harder than rendezvousing with the ISS, coasting to Mars isn't significantly harder than enduring in orbit, and landing propulsively on Mars is much easier than landing propulsively on Earth.

They're not building anything special for this. They're pretty much just entering trajectory information into hardware they're building for other reasons.

They've designed their products so they can prove every needed system by doing useful work around Earth.

It literally is that simple
How do you think they've been sending rovers to mars? Plotting orbital movements/trajectories/etc is relatively straightforward. The only question is whether they have sufficient deltaV

>random kid posting convoluted opinions about workings he knows nothing about

>2/3 of mars probes have failed
>landing on mars is easy
Funny all these armchair rocket scientists who barely understand even newton's law of gravitation saying flying to mars and landing there is "trivial". Based on what? a couple wikipedia articles you skimmed?

>people actually sitting around trolling space exploration and rocket discussion topics

Why didn't any of those old movies about the future tell us the future was going to be like this?

If this trend continues, there will be people shitposting just as hard from Mars/Moon colonies & orbital stations in 50-100 years

>"lol you lunatics don't even have a proper gravity"
>"shut your hole orbital shitposter, inertial gravity isn't real gravity"
>"oh yeah!? we can fly helicopters in our O'Neill cylinder. What do you have? Meme buggies, lol"

>"we found more water ice on mars today"
>"fucking slowpoke posters, no one gives a shit."

>russia fails a shitton of mars missions
>hurr this means its really hard!

or surprise: Russia and other governments are institutionally incompetent, then some bureaucrat/politician/party member says "go", and you have to go despite 0% chance of success.

>

kek, you know, Grasshopper was born in 2012, only four years later the absolute madman landed it on a barge in the middle of the ocean.

Also, doesnt delivering payloads to an orbiting ISS count?

>implying we're gonna get much farther into space than we are now

Liberals & cucks will destroy civilization, defending it is "racism".
Thats why the singularity won't happen

You misunderstand something pivotal. You see, we already have all the tech needed to make it to mars and the moon and have viable colonies there. There's not much new science we will be making that will impact humanity. That is why a singularity won't happen. There's no need for it.

What there is a need for is people like Musk who actually want to do this and who have the means to do it. The only reason it wouldn't happen is that no one wanted to do it.

Nobody said it's "easy", but SpaceX is overcoming greater challenges before attempting this, and using proven systems instead of ad hoc ones.

Dragon V2 is planned as a reusable crew capsule that does fully-automated, purely propulsive landing on Earth, in shape to be simply loaded up and sent to space again. That's about ten times harder than a Mars landing.

The fucking poo in loos got a probe into mars orbit first try, it can;t be that hard

Only one country has ever succeeded the first time round and that was India.

Russia never fucked up Venus, Mars is just hard because you have to dodge the aliens with laser cannons. Dragon will get shot down just like Beagle 2 did.

That's actually not true. ESA's Mars Express has been very successful and is an actual scientific mission unlike the Indian demonstrator.

buh the lander failed. spacex wants to land before they've even managed an orbit. im not saying they can't do it im saying they are moving too fast.

>Indian demonstrator.

They flushed a full payload to Mars.

>moving too fast.

What is the right speed? Wait around so the people who are mentally neck deep into this are too old and have to be replaced with less experienced people?

>spacex wants to land before they've even managed an orbit
The only reason they'd do orbit first is if they couldn't afford a big enough rocket to send a lander.

This isn't some two-bit space agency struggling to put together a satellite that can survive in space for a few months. This is the world's premier space technology company making plans to follow up demonstrating the world's first and only cost-saving reusable orbital launch technology, the world's most capable launch vehicle, and the world's most advanced crew capsule.

You only get a Mars launch window every 26 months. They're not going to wait an extra two years just so they can take baby steps.

>This is the world's premier space technology company making plans to follow up demonstrating the world's first and only cost-saving reusable orbital launch technology, the world's most capable launch vehicle, and the world's most advanced crew capsule.

Tone it down, you sound like a paid shill. lol

It doesn't even matter if it makes it, in fact failures teach better than successes. As seen with the barge landings.

they can send the craft up in pieces, assembling it in orbit

>Tone it down, you sound like a paid shill. lol
If they're ready to do this in 2018, it will mean that they've caught up on their launch backlog (which almost certainly means reusability is working), started routine Falcon Heavy flights, and Dragon V2 is working, propulsive landing and all.

They'll be standing head and shoulders above everyone else. That's not an exaggeration. Right now, the only thing you can really say against them is that it's still possible that their near-term plans won't work.

>failures teach better than successes. As seen with the barge landings.
It would always have been better to succeed from the beginning. Failure was acceptable with the barge landings because this is an improvised recovery mode. It would be a major setback if they spent a Falcon Heavy and a Dragon V2 and failed their primary mission.

This. At least one person with reason in this retarded Musk fanboi echochamber Veeky Forums has become.

>Based on what? a couple wikipedia articles you skimmed?
SpaceX twitter feed, I would guess.

>This is the world's premier space technology company making plans to follow up demonstrating the world's first and only cost-saving reusable orbital launch technology, the world's most capable launch vehicle, and the world's most advanced crew capsule.

>Shilling this hard

space flight and going to mars just isn't that fucking hard.

no one who wasn't a fucking DMV employee ever tried. that's all.

Beagle was only ever a passenger tagged on at the last moment, Mars Express was the mission.

A tiny token payload, it was criticized at the time. I'm not aware of a single paper being published from it's observations either.

>Spacex: "We're gonna build a big rocket with three F9 cores, 27 engines, and we're gonna launch it by 2013"
>2014 happens
>the fanboys: "Oooooooh it's just a 6-month delay, don't worry! Elon said so himself! xD"
The butthurt here when they lost their first paying customer a few months ago was rather glorious

>Beagle was only ever a passenger tagged on at the last moment, Mars Express was the mission.
The most ironic thing about Beagle 2 was that the British at the time were all like "we don't need your european engineering standards", "your regulations are just stifling British ingenuity", "we can built that perfectly by ourselves, we don't need your advice, thank you very much".

Sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it

I'm just waiting for it to blow up. I will bathe in fanboy tears.

It's my own guilty little pleasure too, watching things like that

I don't see what the problem is here. Private companies have sent shit to Mars before. Heck NASA has contracted private to do Mars missions before.

This is pretty much a stunt on SpaceX's part.

Im torn between this and actually wanting space exploration to succeed

>A tiny token payload, it was criticized at the time. I'm not aware of a single paper being published from it's observations either.

>Actually responding to an obvious joke.

Veeky Forums has the most autistic responses of any board. I don't mean the meme use of the word "autistic" I mean people who actually have enough of a degree of autism that it bleeds through in their posts.

If it succeeds it means there will be 1000s of failures in the future when it becomes standardized and normal folk start space traveling. You'll have youtube channels dedicated to the most awesome wrecks and explosions.

Imagine this, only with space shuttles and shit.
youtube.com/watch?v=n41JW39ZB5c

Beagle's troubles came from the fact it was late and only received partial testing as Mars Express would fly without it. It had nothing to do with regulations. The prime contractor was EADS Astrium who were also responsible for Huygens, it's nonsense that they didn't draw on the European knowledge base.

Beagle was done as a British project because ESA weren't interested in just having a go. It was cheap and it gave planetary science in Britain a big kick.

I'm sorry, I didn't realise flogging that particular dead horse was supposed to be funny.

Why not solar electric propulsion to mars from LEO?
Whats the point of chemical?

I generally support SpaceX and of course want them to succeed eventually but they need to have a few catastrophes to bring their fucking fanboys back to Earth.

Solar is only good for little things like orbiters. This is why the Moon landings required fat rockets.

True dat

Solar can be scaled up just as rockets can
ofc landing on mars needs a rocket, so does taking off.

But to actually travel the distance, seems SEP would be good enough, you can only launch once every 2 years, so the slow speed doesn't matter.

>"just scale up bro"
This is what is wrong with every SpaceX fanboy.

>he knew it was a joke

That's fine, the response you gave still shows real world autism.

>has nothing better to contribute so he takes things out of context and adds in some ad hominmemes.

fuck u m8

>to actually travel the distance, seems SEP would be good enough
SEP is expensive, especially if you want to scale it up, and you don't save as much mass as you might expect. Low-thrust systems lose the advantage of the Oberth effect, so their delta-v to get out of gravity wells is much higher.

It's better to save high-Isp propulsion for deep-space maneuvering. It would be nice to have something like a fission fragment drive to be able to just do a chemical launch to Earth escape and then accelerate continuously so launch to Mars can be undertaken any time without worrying about windows, and so more distant targets can be reached and returned from.

>you can only launch once every 2 years, so the slow speed doesn't matter.
Slowly spiralling out from LEO to Earth escape means spending lots of time in the van allen belts, and generally more time soaking in damaging space radiation.

Anyway, slow methods are really unsuitable for manned missions.

Cause falcon heavy should already have enough delta V to send a capsule on a one way trip to Mars. They save some delta V by aerobraking (or geobraking) into Mars.

And why couldn't solar electric propulsion scale?

Ah I see, you would still be leaving LEO by chemical engine
>439 days to mars
lol

Well we can't use chemical rockets to get to mars with the SLS unless we have propellant depots...

And the Raptor doesn't need propellant because?

Well, SLS is based on LOX/H2. The payload goes to shit if you switch to storables, and a LOX/H2 propellant depot is non-trivial. Anyway SLS is not remotely suitable for multi-launch missions. The cost is high because the production is primitive and labor-intensive (SLS is based on technology from the 1970s and earlier), supporting only a low launch rate. A 12-launch mission would take several years to put together.

I think this 1200-ton mission model is for an Apollo-style single-departure mission, with no ISRU, so they need to carry their return propellant, too.

I'm not sure of whether MCT is using in-orbit refuelling or not. But it has some major advantages over this SLS-based mission: the single-launch payload is larger, LOX/methane fuel is far easier to store in space, it's based on a fully-reusable vehicle supporting a high flight rate, they're using multiple separate departures which will land near each other, they're landing the whole vehicle (which is also the upper stage of the launch vehicle) on Mars, and they're refuelling on Mars for the return journey, if any.

If MCT uses in-orbit refuelling, their system would likely use two to four separate reusable upper stages which are also spacecraft:
1) the transit vehicle itself, which would also serve as the fuel depot and the lander,
2) the fuel tanker, which might refill the transit vehicle once after it reached LEO, and possibly again when it reached a high orbit, such as L2 or an elliptical orbit,
3) the cargo shuttle, which would load the transit vehicle, and
4) the passenger shuttle, which would have extra safety features.

It's not clear whether SpaceX has something like this planned, or if they're just going to launch directly from Earth to Mars. They've said they want to be able to take 100 people per trip. That suggests in-orbit refuelling, since it seems unlikely that they could do this in one launch with a 200-300 ton payload to LEO.

"100 people per trip" either implies a convoy of 20x whatever sends 5 people, or a completely unconceived-of vehicle that somehow holds 100 people. I don't know why you engineers have such a hard time seeing through Elon's BS.

>It's not clear whether SpaceX has something like this planned, or if they're just going to launch directly from Earth to Mars. They've said they want to be able to take 100 people per trip. That suggests in-orbit refuelling, since it seems unlikely that they could do this in one launch with a 200-300 ton payload to LEO.
SpaceX fanboys have changed their tune. i remember when I posted the giga rocket 3x the size of Saturn V that was supposed to go straight to Mars all you lot passionately defended it. now it's "unlikely"

>I remember when I posted the giga rocket 3x the size of Saturn V that was supposed to go straight to Mars all you lot passionately defended it. now it's "unlikely"

Nobody with half a brain thought that was a likely or preferred method of going to mars.

Just like Cars need gas stations to go cross-country, Spacecraft will have to use inter-planetary refuel depots. At the very least something in LEO and then another one orbiting Mars. Maybe even something in between.

Of course that is going to cost a fuck-ton to launch and maintain such depots, which is why reusable rockets are so important. If it was just a matter of building a really, really big one-time rocket NASA would be a better bet.

>Maybe even something in between.

You need to stop talking about space travel until you learn the basics of maneuvers.

There is no reason to believe that you can't send a spacecraft in advance at slower speeds on the same trajectory, maybe a few weeks in advance.

I am sure it would be difficult as fuck and docking would be tricky as well.

But there is no logical reason that it would be impossible, maybe just impractical until technology improves.

Would a Martian fuel depot cut travel time to Neptune? if Musk's meme ideas can at least make scientific exploration of the outer solar system easier then I am on board.

Is this one of those things where you claim that you were only pretending to be retarded?

>cut travel time to Neptune

Why Neptune?

The most commercially useful feature in our Solar System is the asteroid belt inbetween Mars and Jupiter. That is where a theoretical Martian depot would lead too.

Mars Depot would make any Deep-Space mission more feasible because you would be able to extract useful minerals and fuel from Mars itself to power missions, instead of ferrying everything all the way from Earth.

full retard

It is one of those things where someone on the internet says something is not possible but doesn't give a reason why, then pretends they are a super genius who knows everything and is a director at NASA when they are actually just retarded.

>a completely unconceived-of vehicle that somehow holds 100 people
Why do you have trouble imagining a vehicle that can carry 100 people? Planes fly with hundreds of people on them all the time.

A 12-meter-diameter vehicle that launched to LEO weighing 200+tons as an empty shell, before being fuelled, furnished, supplied, and boarded is pretty easily imaginable as a vehicle for 100 passengers for a few months.

>when I posted the giga rocket 3x the size of Saturn V that was supposed to go straight to Mars all you lot passionately defended it. now it's "unlikely"
It's not unlikely that they'll build a rocket 3 times the size of Saturn V (that's their stated plan), capable of launching straight to Mars (even Falcon Heavy can launch straight to Mars). It's unlikely that they'll launch 100 people directly to Mars on that rocket.

In a direct-launch-to-Mars architecture, it's more likely that the vehicle would carry a much smaller number of people. I think 20 is possible, though it might be on the high side.

It does get easier as you go to higher numbers. A life support system for 20 times more people isn't 20 times harder to build and maintain. As you go to larger groups, it makes more sense to use mass-saving tricks like water and oxygen recycling, which can fail to save mass for a small crew.

>is pretty easily imaginable as a vehicle for 100 passengers for a few months

Such accommodations are trickier than you might expect. Being hermetically sealed with hundreds of other strangers for long periods of time might not go as you expect.

You could create a larger 'living community' but that would require more weight, complexity, and volume.

Other option might be deep-sleep but that has never been tried before in such a manner and scale.

Sorry kid your ideas are so retarded that even people who have played Kerbal Space Program know better. Or really, anyone with common sense.

It's really sad that you came to Veeky Forums to talk about science and you are still so much more ignorant and stupid than everyone else that even here you get looked down on, but that's what you get for refusing to read a book.

full retard

Yes, let's pointlessly move like a snail and make sure that any colonization attempts occur 300 years from now.

There's a time and a place for a slow incremental approach and this isn't it. Slow and incremental is well-accounted for via literally every other space agency in the world. If SpaceX thinks they can land shit on Mars, why not let them try? There's no good reason for them to go at anybody else's pace.

And the total sum of funding given specifically to development of regular flights to mars is comparable to the average elementary schooler's lunch money for a week and worse NASA's contractors have made sure that the effectiveness of said funds are equal to a single day's lunch money.

Basically everything has been set up to create a non-ideal climate for any kind of mission more complex than slinging a probe at something. Difficulty isn't what's holding up space exploration, a hopelessly broken system is. Circumvent the broken system and shit will start happening.

>being hopeful and optimistic is bad

Yeah I get that hardcore fanboyism can be grating, but you can't deny that a giant shot in the arm of hype is exactly what the space industry needs right now. We're finally getting spaceflight back into the eye of the public at large and starting to to mass opinion space-positive. There's a good chance that the space drought could finally be over soon. Why put a tamper on that? I can deal with a few obnoxious folks for that kind of leap.

>that's their stated plan
No, I don't think they have any any firm design on what the MCT rocket is going to look like
Just vague things said years ago that are probably quite dated.

Probably going to be wider than 12 meters, always want to leave room to grow.

If this is refering to the tread here a while back showing a comparison artist drawing, then that drawing was pretty shit. Even the article the drawing came from refered to a launch vehicle no more than 30 feet taller than a Saturn V, not 2-3 times its size like the picture suggested.

>comercially useful
Im not a popsci faggot, i prioritize the exploration of Neptune over space hotels on Mars or whatever

You do know that Neptune is just a bunch of gas, right?
Beyond "ooooh, methane!!!", whats tjere to explore?

weather systems, magnetic fields, more detailed analysis of its chemistry, triton...

Im done with Veeky Forums this place is pop sci fantasy land. No threads ever on martian geology or venusian cloud systems its all space cities and warp drives.

>Im done with Veeky Forums this place is pop sci fantasy land. No threads ever on martian geology or venusian cloud systems its all space cities and warp drives.

I know brother, I know.

we need to add the MCT to that image.

Wait, wtf is "Free Will" in this chart? Like the whole "man has free will"-thing?

Are you new or really have not seen those shitty threads?

i'm fairly new. Never been to /pol/ though, but if all the "Flat Earth" and "muh 9/11 mini nukes" thread in here is any indication, I consider myself lucky for that

90% of the failures were shit soviet probes that blew up during launch or failed due to shit quality control en-route.
Even fucking India managed it, and half the country shits outside.

Free will is real you stupid faggot. Only edgy fedora-tier teens think otherwise.

pls happen

Science says otherwise.

io9.gizmodo.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-probably-dont-have-free-will

Check out the citations.

anti-matter,black holes,time and space dilation and relativity are meme science but it does exists.

btw:the name anti-matter needs to be changed.

But, you see, his intuition on this is very strong.
So, your "science" must be wrong!
Because fuck going where the evidence leads if its in any way uncomfortable.

Even defining "free will" is a difficult philosophical problem. It's not something you can just empirically investigate and have a clear answer on because science.

This attitude is scientism at its worst.

>Even the article the drawing came from refered to a launch vehicle no more than 30 feet taller than a Saturn V, not 2-3 times its size like the picture suggested.
A vehicle 30 feet taller than Saturn V could easily be 2-3 times more massive or voluminous.

How long in days?
SLS is what I am hyped for

>misrepresenting conclusions
come on mate, you can do better than that.

>SLS is what I am hyped for
Give up on that. SLS might get a bullshit demo flight this decade, in a half-assed effort by NASA to pretend they're trying to meet the program requirements given in the law, but it won't be ready for real work until the middle of the 2020s, and even then, even if it does work, it'll be too expensive, unproven, and capable of too few launches to be worth using.

It's just being pushed by old men to plunder the treasury in the few years before they retire. They could throw out SLS and start from a clean sheet and be closer to having a usable super-heavy launch vehicle.