Bold Space Mission To Bring Back Rocks From Mars Takes Shape (sciencemag.org) 48
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: In just over 1 decade, a small capsule shaped like a flying saucer could blaze in from space and smash into an empty Utah desert. Its payload would be momentous: less than 1 kilogram of rocks gathered on Mars. After years as a dream, Mars sample return is now a $7 billion plan, devised jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). It is a complicated plan, involving three heavy rocket launches from Earth, two rovers, the first ever rocket launch from another planet, and a daring space rendezvous between a sample container and a spacecraft that would ferry it back to Earth. The first element, NASA's Mars 2020 rover, is nearly built and ready for launch next summer. And now, NASA and the Europeans are close to finalizing the plans to bring the samples collected by Mars 2020 home, with ESA likely to commit funding to the work at a meeting later this month.
7 billion dollar? (Score:3)
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Have they asked Elon Musk already for a quote?
TFA doesn't mention SpaceX. It doesn't explicitly say SLS either but implies it will be used.
If they let Musk handle the launches, they could likely cut the cost of the mission in half.
Socialism in space needs to end. It has held us back for six decades.
Re: 7 billion dollar? (Score:1)
Forget cutting costs in half; $7 billion will likely be far less than the entire development costs of the Starship/Heavy project, with enough left over to send a maned mission to collect as many rocks as they want.
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To be fair, six decades ago, socialism in space took us to the moon.
Granted it's done rather less since then, but neither has it held back space capitalism. Socialised investments in space development bought much expertise in a number of private companies, but they chose to do nothing with it beyond chasing more fat government contracts.
Only now have private companies leveraged that to go beyond what NASA paid for, but there was nothing preventing them earlier, they just got fat and lazy instead. Socialism
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Re:7 billion dollar? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only now have private companies leveraged that to go beyond what NASA paid for, but there was nothing preventing them earlier,
No, but it's usually unwise for commercial companies to do something that has no customers. Like when NASA nixed SpaceX's propulsive landing for Crew Dragon, did they keep doing their own thing or did they just go "okay, if that's what you want we'll do parachutes"? The latter. The main driver for the creation of the Falcon 9 was NASA's COTS project giving them funding, information and launch contracts. They basically said if you can build it, we will buy it. That's huge, I mean you can talk about what the Falcon Heavy or BFR could do but as long as all the money goes to the SLS instead that's just theoretical and not income for SpaceX. Of course right now SpaceX is self-sustainable on third party satellite launches, but judging by the extremely few Falcon Heavy flights there's not a screaming demand in the market and basically none for the BFR. It's just SpaceX trying to create their own market with Starlink, with one possible joyride around the moon - but they said that about Falcon Heavy too and it never happened.
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Of course right now SpaceX is self-sustainable on third party satellite launches, but judging by the extremely few Falcon Heavy flights there's not a screaming demand in the market and basically none for the BFR. It's just SpaceX trying to create their own market with Starlink, with one possible joyride around the moon - but they said that about Falcon Heavy too and it never happened.
While it's entirely true there's been no swarm of customers beating down SpaceX's door for Falcon Heavy launches, that's mostly because buying a launch for a payload that heavy has been unthinkably expensive for the entirety of the past 60 years. Now that SpaceX has published a fixed firm price that isn't astronomical for payloads that size, businesses can actually plan ahead and start seriously thinking about using all of that capacity. It takes years to design and build (the first of) any new satellite,
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If the SLS is involved, there's no possible way to achieve the mission for the proposed $7B. Each SLS launch alone is $2B, it says there'll be 3 heavy lift launches so that's $6B. That only leaves $1B to design, develop and build:
1) An ESA rover with a robot arm to collect the cached samples
2) A new NASA lander featuring a novel "ascent tube"
3) A novel ascent vehicle capable of an automated takeoff from Mars after spending years in space
4) The Earth Return Orbiter which is capable of capturing the ascent ve
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>
Socialism in space needs to end. It has held us back for six decades.
Yeah - Spacex has shown how we can go to the stars with zero guvmint money or involvement. I applaud Spacex, but don't pee on my leg and tell me its raining. There is nothing about Spacex that has anything to do with free market or private enterprise, or whatever you're trying to say.
Meanwhile Spacex is cleaning up after an unexpected accidental disassembly. https://www.express.co.uk/vide... [express.co.uk]
Scott Manley has a vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Two crew carriers now gone boom - although the seco
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There's plenty of room in his cybertruck.
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"Have they asked Elon Musk already for a quote?"
Yes, he said he'd bring it back from Mars for free on one of his return milk-runs.
Sample Return Mission (Score:3, Interesting)
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This must be really hard to do if it's taken over 25 years to make happen.
Most NASA delays are about funding, not tech.
In the 1990s, we had the shuttle and ISS sucking up so many billions that little useful was done.
The shuttle is gone, and the ISS will soon be gone as well. Good riddance.
No vision (Score:5, Insightful)
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For sure! SpaceX is going to land people on Mars pretty soon now. Right after they launch a few more satellites.
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SpaceX doesn't have much of a vision either. They are working on a big rocket, but that's all they have right now. There's no lander, no habitat, and no concrete plans for the flight itself, or what to do when they get there.
Also, Mars is far away, and does not really lend itself to quick prototyping.
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I thought they were going to send Musk up there and he'd build the necessary stuff with local money. That deal fall through?
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We'll make the Martians pay to supply the rocks and bring them to us.
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The rocket is the lander. It's also big enough to be a habitat for years. It's an ISS of space, and people have lived on the ISS for over a year already.
They are counting on NASA to fill in a lot of details, of course... and surviving the radiation on the way there remains a concern.
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Andromeda Strain (Score:1)
Maybe they can bring back (Score:2)
some of the insects along with the rocks!
metric conversion (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA and ESA working together? What are the chances of another metric conversion 'bug' that will make this mission end in a fiasco.
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US Customary Units (Score:3)
The USA hasn't used the Imperial system for quite a while---it uses the US Customary unit system. While they share a common heritage, they are not equivalent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Sound familiar? (Score:3)
Reminds me of the Genesis return vehicle. Is this prediction a planned "crash" into the Utah desert or an unplanned one, like the flying-saucer shaped Genesis capsule that embedded itself into the Utah desert floor?
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1 - Wake up 2 - Smell covfefe (Score:2)
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That is just old fuddy-duddy NASA and ESA. We all know they don't know anything. Mars One and SpaceX will be sending crews to their outposts on Mars very soon now. Just check their websites!
Why? (Score:2)
Mars One will will an operational output on Mars by 2030. And likely SpaceX will have one too. I know because the CEOs said so. Stupid government can't do anything right! They will be playing with rocks while the rest of us will be sipping wine in our Hyperloops on Mars!
What is the bloody point? (Score:1)
A machine should be able to do any analysis better than a human, if not now, then soon. How much would it cost to, say, once a year, send an analysis device to Mars to collect data... during that year, the devices we send will improve, presumably the efficiency (and hence cost) of sending the device will drop, so we'll keep getting better data, and we can send it to a different part of Mars, to collect a larger source of data...
Just seems like a colossal waste of money, in light of the direction that every
Re:What is the bloody point? (Score:4, Insightful)
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> In 2018 alone, SpaceX made 21 successful launches. The new Falcon Heavy rocket – a more powerful version of the Falcon 9 – launched in February. This rocket can lift 63,800 kilograms, equivalent to more than 27 Asian elephants, to low Earth o
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If you're a never-humans-on-Mars person, then your argument makes a ton of sense.
But this could be seen as a compromise between people who want humans to get to Mars and the "rovers only" crowd. They could possibly get another rover on Mars to do more remote exploration, and we could learn a shit ton about how to send something to Mars and bring it back along with bits of Mars.
I also think that there's a lot of good reasons to bring rocks back here. There's a hell of a lot of scientific analysis technique
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There's a hell of a lot of scientific analysis techniques and equipment that can't be bolted onto a rover and operated via remote control
Also, sending a rover creates some sort of 'feature paralysis' where it takes forever to make a decision, because the mission is so costly that you want to have it be perfect.
You don't even solve that by sending humans, because they would still need to bring the right set of tools and instruments.
organisms (Score:1)