SpaceX announces a mission to land on Mars by 2018

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/03/spacex_announces_a_mission_to_land_on_mars_by_2018.html

by jonbaer • 10 years ago

131 50 10 years ago

baldfat• 10 years ago

I never thought I would live to actually see the day. Seemed like everything just slowed down on that front for two decades and now it seems almost to soon.

tlrobinson2• 10 years ago

To be clear, this particular mission is an unmanned mission, which of course has done many times before. But it would be the heaviest payload ever landed on Mars, and would pave the way for future manned missions.

Frompo4• 10 years ago

No way they will be able to plan, make, and test any interesting instruments if they start now. With the proposed time line it is guaranteed to be a pure put trash on Mars mission.

cardamomo3• 10 years ago

I am an elementary school teacher, and while I teach many subjects, this news has the geek in me very excited. As we get closer to the launch date, kids, no doubt, will be very excited about this mission. I get to plan space- and Mars-based curriculum now!

solipsism2• 10 years ago

Will you show the launch in class, if the timing works out?

cardamomo3• 10 years ago

Absolutely! My goal would be to plan a series of experiences prior to the launch that would give the children a real-world understanding of what they're seeing on the screen. I imagine many of this article's readers who arrive from HN may have a deep understanding of the technical difficulty of what SpaceX is trying to do, especially given their timeframe. How would children understand this event, however, if we simply watched the launch on screen? People hurl giant flying objects through the sky every minute of every day, so what's the big deal?

Creating soda bottle rockets in the classroom and encountering real-world (though kid-level) engineering challenges would be a first step.

ljf2• 10 years ago

Few other interesting articles on this have been posed in the last few days, but none have got much traction - if you are interested more to read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988

richmarr• 10 years ago

Is that the link you meant to post? Looks like it's about solar

ljf2• 10 years ago

Ha no! Ah well a bit late now!

lorenzhs• 10 years ago

Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11582605 last week

jawns2• 10 years ago

There's a really great throwaway joke in the caption of one of the illustrations that accompany the story.

In the image captioned "The trajectory of a Falcon 9 booster from launch to landing," the caption directs the reader: "Click to vonbraunenate."

I googled "vonbraunenate," and there were only a handful of results aside from this particular article.

So then I googled "von braun," and of course, the first result that came up was the Wikipedia entry for Wernher von Braun.

So what's the connection?

Von Braun was an aerospace engineer who "developed the rockets that launched United States first space satellite and first series of manned lunar missions."

user24• 10 years ago

I get the connection, I don't get the joke...

samsari• 10 years ago

Diagrams are occasionally labelled "click to explode".

Frompo4• 10 years ago

Yeah, verbifying von Braun doesn't make something with a clear meaning.

jawns2• 10 years ago

Typically, the text would read something like "Click to zoom."

Which is what rockets do.

lucian1900• 10 years ago

Phil Plait puts that sort of thing in most of his articles.

robodale• 10 years ago

I noticed vonbraunenate as well, and assumed it was the name of the flickr account that owned the Falcon 9 trajectory image...but I didn't catch the Von Braun reference until you mentioned it. Good catch!

arethuza• 10 years ago

Von Braun's biopic was called "I Aim at the Stars" - some wit suggested that it should also have the subtitle "(But Sometimes I Hit London)"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars

Aelinsaar• 10 years ago

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department says Wernher Von Braun"

jccooper• 10 years ago

Von Braun in known for designing ever-larger rockets, culminating in the Saturn V (and continuing on paper). Goes along with "click to enlarge".

curtis• 10 years ago

Phil Plait has a long history of using phrases like "Click to X" where X is some made up verb.

Try this Google search: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22phil+plait%22+%22cli...

In the first few results I see:

Click to vonbraunenate

Click to embiggen

Click to barsoomenate

Click to enaurumenate

Click to cascadienate

Etc.

neuromancer2701• 10 years ago

If you read near the end of the article, they say that SpaceX is going to launch a Falcon Heavy in November as a test. But additionally they are going to try to land all three boosters. The two side boosters on land and the middle booster on the drone ship(because it will be going a lot faster)

Here is a simulation(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ca6x4QbpoM). I have probably watch this video 20+ times just amazing.

dsfuoi2• 10 years ago

That is a promo.

Here is an actual simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89AIsPTCJLs

dsfuoi2• 10 years ago

Replay at 16x speed if you're busy: https://youtu.be/89AIsPTCJLs?t=10m35s

lmm2• 10 years ago

SpaceX has a pretty poor history of keeping to their announced schedules (e.g. Falcon Heavy was supposed to fly in what, 2015?). So while this will be great if it happens, I wouldn't get too excited yet.

findthewords• 10 years ago

The thing is, if they miss the date by mere months, they will have to wait 2 years for the next launch window.

iandanforth• 10 years ago

More info for people curious about this. The best time to launch is during "Earth Mars opposition" and the next window is in Jul 2018. After that there is a 26 month wait before the next optimal (from a fuel perspective) time.

onion2k• 10 years ago

I'm sure it'd be impossible, or foolish, or just plain silly, but I'd really like it if a SpaceX launch could be "crowdsourced". Not money or ideas, but the actual process of the launch itself. Set up a website with a big red "launch" button that links to the physical launch process, and only launch the mission once, say, a million people have clicked the button. All those people would get to say they've played a tiny part in launching a mission to space.

It'd certainly be about the closest I'll ever come to participating in an actual space mission, and it'd be a heck of a lot of fun.

It probably needs to be more rigorous than that though.

outworlder2• 10 years ago

Launch windows are pretty specific. Not sure about the next Mars one, but some windows are so narrow that launches can be scrapped if the window is missed by even a couple of seconds.

ohitsdom2• 10 years ago

I'm really interested to see if and how SpaceX covers the cost of this mission. Is it just a huge R&D/PR write off? Do they sell data/instrument payload slots to NASA or others?

SpaceX announces a mission to land on Mars by 2018

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