SpaceX adds Mars haulage to its price list Elon Musk's SpaceX has started offering cargo haulage to Mars. The company's ”capabilities” page now includes an option titled “Payload to Mars” that wasn't there last time the internet archive scanned the page back in early April 2016. For just US$62m SpaceX will send 4,020kg to Mars atop a Falcon 9. If you've rather more …
Why? There are no waterfront properties to ruin and run down there, so from that perspective, why bother?
Even if they were, how do you define suitably puritan (no t*ts allowed) and suitably misoginistic dress code for the Martian entry into the Miss universe pageant. For sake of argument, let's assume certain movies with Natasha Henstridge to be documentaries. Also, how do you prevent them from eating (or f*** the brains out) of other participants?
And send the remaining five presidential candidates to Mars. I'm sure we could raise that money in no time at all. It'll be cheap, even with Trump's ego the total weight would be under 4850 kg (we won't bother with food, water or oxygen for them, to save weight)
Then we'll be forced to start over with new candidates. Sure, they might not be better, but pretty sure they couldn't be worse!
Yep, it's delivery to Mars. Doesn't say anything about a landing so either leave it in orbit (and wait for the occupants to come out and retrieve it), or just let Martian gravity reel it in and see if they're packaged well enough to survive a 50km drop off the truck.
Considering NASA struggled to get Curiosity to Mars, and it only weighs 1 ton, that's pretty impressive.
Note that this is quite an upgrade of the Merlin, and probably includes the supercooled fuel and other tweaks.
Also notice these prices are with recovered boosters, but the payload quoted is where the boosters are NOT recovered. Musk had an earlier tweet where he said recovery cost something like 15% of payload, but it's been deleted.
Most other long range stacks have a fourth/trajectory insertion stage. ULA and Arianne if memory serves me right bespokes that part every time. They standardize at payload fairing level. Russians have it standardized all the way by means of Fregat and Briz. This is one of the reasons most long range missions use them nowdays.
What is Elon going to use here?
The performance of the Falcon 9, on the archive is 4850kg to GTO. On the new price chat it is 8300kg. Prices for Mars are impressive enough but the increased payload of the Falcon 9 is just plain amazing. I don't know if there is room for another 50% increase with the current engines but Musk might not need a Heavy for Red Dragon.
This flight to Mars is about at the right time to test Falcon Heavy. The timing is set by the orbits of Earth and Mars, and there might not be that many payloads that need to be that big, so it's certain to be an early Falcon heavy launch. Because they're using so much of the same hardware at the Falcon 9, it's less of a risk, but it'll show the system is good, if it works. The flight to Mars and the landing are almost a bonus.
(Yes, I have Kerbal Space Program.)
Advertising that they are ready to take stuff to Mars (vicinity? orbit? surface?) is great, kudos SpaceX, but...
The best way to advertise that you can do a thing is to... actually do a thing.
Thus, the best thing SpaceX could do would be to buy a lander (or make one, but getting someone else who has done it before to build it for them would be better), get all the SpaceX employees to throw in some stuff they want to send (Have your family's picture sent to Mars or, symbolically your Mother-in-Law's picture.) and just send it off.
As long as SpaceX remembers to have four cameras transmitting back to Earth, it should work great.
PS Didn't the Arkyd Series 100 asteroid spotter get advertised as having a screen within the camera's line of sight? If memory serves, you could pay to have your picture appear on the screen and then the camera would take a picture of it with one he-double-hockeysticks of a background. Let SpaceX do that!
Thinking about the successful First Stage landings that we've seen from SpaceX so far (3), it's obvious that Elon Musk is pushing his domestic program to learn enough to be able to safely land the Red Dragon on Mars.
Now, you *could* do all sorts with that, including carry payloads for the likes of NASA and other agencies, such as rovers and the like. At the moment I do not see much in the way of commercial demand for landing payloads there, but would love to be proven wrong.
Where this gets interesting, however, will be the work done in preparation for a human landing. We have already seen how SpaceX uses "spare capacity" to push their design envelope and experiment with new technology. You can bet that if anyone wants to send a partial payload to Mars, then SpaceX will take the order and pack every gram of spare capacity with their own experimental gear. Even if the rockets carry nothing more than spare materials or tools then it will be worthwhile.
The true genius of SpaceX and Musk has been the way they have got their current customers to pay for their R&D in such an efficient way. Don't expect that to stop any time soon.
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