SpaceX may have just slain the Red Dragon. On 19 July, Elon Musk announced that his company would be redesigning its Mars landing plans and moving away from the previous Red Dragon lander.
Last year, SpaceX announced plans to go to Mars in 2018 using an upgraded, uncrewed Dragon spacecraft, a version of which is already used to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. In February, that plan was delayed to 2020. Now, it seems the Dragon won’t be going to Mars at all.
“There was a time that I thought the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where you’ve got a base heat shield and side-mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars,” Musk said at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, D.C.
But a thruster-based landing can be difficult for a Martian spacecraft, which faces a greater danger of smashing on the ground than a craft with parachutes. In order to move forward with that plan, SpaceX would have to comply with NASA’s stringent safety requirements. “It would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety, particularly for crew transport,” he said.
Replacing Red Dragon
Musk said SpaceX is planning a new, smaller and less expensive spacecraft to replace the Red Dragon, which may be unveiled as soon as September.
It was unclear how Musk planned to pay for the complete development of the Red Dragon, but he has been more transparent about how he plans to raise money for this new endeavor — despite his acknowledgement that it is “super expensive”.
“You make it capable of doing Earth orbit activity as well as Mars activity,” he said. “I think this one’s got a shot of being real on the economic front.”
For now, Musk said that SpaceX will largely focus on completing the crewed version of the standard Dragon capsule. NASA plans to use the Dragon to transport astronauts to the Space Station from American soil, which hasn’t been possible since the end of the space shuttle programme in 2011.
Boring Mars
One of Musk’s other endeavors, the Boring Company, is also working on new plans to build fast trains in tunnels underneath major cities. On July 20 he tweeted that he had received approval to build a train tunnel for his Hyperloop — a system of transportation pods propelled through vacuum tubes at up to 1200 kilometres per hour — from New York to Washington, DC.
That’s not to say he’ll only be focused on Earth-bound projects. “I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars,” said Musk.
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