SpaceX's Elon Musk, Lockheed Martin Announcing Updated Mars Plans Tonight

[LongTomH]

LiveScience: SpaceX's Elon Musk, Lockheed Martin Announcing Updated Mars Plans Tonight:

Both companies will do so at the 68th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia. First up is Lockheed, which will announce updates to its "Mars Base Camp" concept at 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT; 7:30 a.m. Friday local Adelaide time).

Then, at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday (0430 GMT; 2 p.m. Adelaide time), SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will reveal changes to the company's Mars-colonization architecture, which Musk first announced last year at the 67th IAC in Mexico.

"Major improvements & some unexpected applications to be unveiled on Friday at @IAC2017 in Australia," he said via Twitter Monday (Sept. 25).

Headed to Adelaide soon to describe new BFR planetary colonizer design in detail @IAC2017. This should be worth seeing. Design feels right," Musk added in another tweet Tuesday (Sept. 26). (BFR stands for Big F***ing Rocket.)

At last year's IAC meeting, Musk unveiled SpaceX's planned Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship combo designed to help establish a million-person city on Mars in the next 50 to 100 years. The 40-foot-wide (12 meters) booster would feature 42 Raptor engines and be more than twice as powerful as NASA's Saturn V moon rocket. The ITS spaceship, meanwhile, would be capable of carrying a minimum of 100 people to the Red Planet.

Elon Musk's talk should be available on the SpaceX YouTube channel. Keep watching.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Here's a couple of write-ups:

Lockheed Martin Unveils Sleek, Reusable Lander for Crewed Mars Missions

The aerospace company Lockheed Martin late Thursday (Sept. 28) revealed new details for its Mars Base Camp plan, an architecture aimed at building a crewed space station in orbit around the Red Planet that would support long-term exploration at Mars by astronautson 1,000-day missions. Among the updates unveiled was a tantalizing design for a reusable, single-stage surface lander called the Mars Ascent/Descent Vehicle (MADV). [In Pictures: Lockheed Martin's Mars Base Camp Plan]

The MADV would attach to the space station, and travel to and from the Martian surface via supersonic retropropulsion, which uses rocket engines to slow the lander from supersonic speeds during its descent, according to three Lockheed Martin engineers who discussed the lander in a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia. Supersonic retropropulsion is the same approach used by SpaceX in to land its reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters.

The initial crewed missions to the Martian surface would be "relatively short-duration, science-focused missions," according to a newly-released report from the company (which you can read and download here). Eventually, the reusable lander would allow up to four astronauts to take two-week missions to the ground. The report suggests sending two landers, mostly for redundancy purposes to ensure astronauts don't get stuck on the surface of the planet.

The lander would refuel on the space station, and would utilize liquid hydrogen fuel, which would come from water molecules broken into their composite oxygen and hydrogen atoms. (This requires energy that would be supplied by the solar panels on the station.)

https://www.space.com/38306-lockheed-martin-reusable-mars-lander-unveiled.html

Elon Musk Wants Giant SpaceX Spaceship to Fly People to Mars by 2024

SpaceX aims to launch its first cargo mission to Mars in 2022 and send people toward the Red Planet just two years after that.
...
As Musk described it last year, the roughly 40-foot-wide (12 meters) ITS booster would feature 42 Raptor engines. It would launch the spaceship to Earth orbit, then come back down to its pad for a pinpoint landing — and another flight in quick succession. The spaceship, meanwhile, would be fueled in orbit by a tanker (which would also be launched by an ITS booster).

The ITS spaceships would linger in orbit until the time was right to depart for Mars, when they would do so en masse. (Such windows come along once every 26 months.) Each ship would be capable of carrying about 100 people to the Red Planet; after landing there and offloading their cargo and passengers, the ships would top up their tanks on the Martian surface with locally produced propellant (methane and oxygen) and then launch back to Earth.

The new plan retains this same basic idea, but with some important tweaks. For example, the rocket has been scaled back a bit; it will now be about 30 feet (9 wide) and sport "just" 31 Raptor engines. (For comparison, the first stage of SpaceX's in-service Falcon 9 rocket has nine Merlin engines.) And the name "ITS" seems to be out: During Friday's talk, Musk repeatedly referred to the system by the "code name" BFR, which is short for Big F***ing Rocket.

https://www.space.com/38313-elon-musk-spacex-fly-people-to-mars-2024.html

[LongTomH]

2. Thank you for posting this!!!

[hunter]

3. I don't get it. What's the point of sending humans to Mars?

We can build robot explorers that can do everything human explorers can do, better and at less cost. And our robots are getting more sophisticated every day.

I doubt humans such as ourselves will ever have a meaningful presence beyond low earth orbit. Our intellectual offspring, beings engineered to thrive beyond earth environments, might.

[FiveGoodMen]

4. Completely agree.