SpaceX sets sights on Mars mission
Next stop: Mars? In December, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif., better known as SpaceX, landed a rocket on Earth, flying a booster stage of one of its Falcon 9 rockets back to Cape Canaveral.
This month, the company repeated the feat even more impressively, setting the booster down on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
Now SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, has its sights set farther away: It aims to land one of its capsules on the surface of Mars. That journey could launch as early as 2018, the company announced in a Twitter message Wednesday.
Musk has said that SpaceX’s long-term goal is to colonize Mars, and he has talked of an ambitious schedule to get people there in the mid-2020s.
But before that happens, Musk, not to mention any would-be colonists, have to make sure that the technology for getting to Mars in one piece actually works.
In an announcement Wednesday, SpaceX said
it planned to send an unmanned Dragon capsule to Mars in 2018 and land it on the surface about six months later. (Mars and Earth line up only once every 26 months.)
NASA also plans to send people to Mars, although not as quickly, aiming for the mid2030s. Critics have said that NASA’s distant plans lack the specifics, funding and plausibility needed to meet even that nebulous schedule.
On Wednesday afternoon, a couple of hours after the SpaceX twitter message, Dava Newman, NASA’s deputy administrator, wrote: “We are closer than ever before to sending American astronauts to Mars than anyone, anywhere, at any time has ever been. A new consensus is emerging around NASA’s plan and timetable for sending astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s.”
NASA have emphasized that — unlike with the Apollo missions to the moon — the agency is not doing everything alone, but rather is enlisting the help of other countries and commercial endeavors.
Almost in passing, Newman mentioned the SpaceX Mars effort.
“Among the many exciting things we’re doing with American businesses, we’re particularly excited about an upcoming SpaceX project that would build upon a current ‘no-exchange-of-funds’ agreement we have with the company,” she wrote. “In exchange for Martian entry, descent and landing data from SpaceX, NASA will offer technical support for the firm’s plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars.”
Landing on Mars is tricky. The atmosphere is thick enough that friction heats an arriving spacecraft to thousands of degrees, yet the atmosphere is too thin for parachutes to provide a gentle landing.
NASA has turned to innovative devices like air bags, used to cushion the landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004, and a Rube Goldberg-esque “sky crane” system to set down the larger and heavier Curiosity rover in 2012.
A team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California proposed SpaceX’s Dragon capsule as a cheaper way to land on Mars, using rocket engines. SpaceX liked the idea enough to start working on it as well, signing an agreement to tap into NASA expertise.
A SpaceX spokesman declined to provide more details regarding the plans.
But even with SpaceX’s recent technological tours de force, getting to Mars in 2018 would be a huge, quick leap for a company that has yet to leave Earth’s neighborhood.