SpaceX announces a mission to land on Mars by 2018 | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX announces a mission to land on Mars by 2018

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131 pointsjonbaer50 comments

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

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.

That is a promo.

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

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

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!

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

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.

my dad always used to joke that the key to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Which is surprisingly an accurate representation of how orbit works.

I find that the biggest thing that is often mistaught/misunderstood is orbital mechanics. You dont get to the moon by aiming directly at the moon. You dont get to mars by aiming directly at mars.

Watching lil einsteins with my kid the other day. and in episode one they say "we've left gravity!" as they travel to space. Which clearly is not how it works.

I think the falling past the edge of the world repeatedly really helps people get a grasp on how orbit works. and once you get that concept down, you can move the sphere of influence to the sun and get space travel down.

Might depend on what grade "elementary" is. Kindergarden might struggle, but I bet 5th grade could handle it.

https://xkcd.com/1356/ . Seriously, Kerbal Space Program teaches you so much more and faster than anything else.

Yeah. I have an engineering degree but never really thought much about orbital mechanics.

My first try at KSP I just overbuilt a rocket and aimed it directly at the mun. I missed. Quickload. Back on target, sudden realization that I need about 6000 dV to slow down in time. Watch a Scott Manley video -> instant understanding.

It's definitely one of those things that once you understand it, it's mind boggling how often space is depicted incorrectly.

Thats also a Douglas Adams quote from HHGTTG.

Great points. I wonder how hard it would be to put parachutes on the bottle rockets. You could put a small landing target on the ground, and offer a small prize if someone hits it (just to pique their interest). Might give the kids a sense of what SpaceX is up against trying to land the first stages (wind, small target) when zero of their rockets float onto the target.

This suggestion reminds me of the classic "egg drop" challenge (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_drop_competition). Can you land your vehicle without the egg breaking?

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."

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

Diagrams are occasionally labelled "click to explode".

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

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

Which is what rockets do.

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I thought the biggest concern about launch window was journey time? And that would only matter for a crewed mission. I didn't think fuel mattered because it would probably be close for either mission profile- burn to get up to speed, shutdown and coast for months, then any orbit corrections and slowdowns as the Mars approach nears. It's not like the engine is burning for the whole trip, and they'll be using solar for internal instruments. Or am I misunderstanding?

You are, the total energy required for a transfer varies considerably depending on the phasing of the planets.

This is mars->Earth, but you get the idea. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/images/mission/...

Do you have more info on Earth Mars opposition launch windows? It struck me as odd because a western-quadrature[1] alignment is a decent approximation of a launch window when using a Hohmann transfer from an inner to outer planet in KSP.

The maven orbital path[2] seems to confirm this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_(astronomy)#/media/...

[2] http://mars.nasa.gov/images/MAVEN_orbital_path_rev-br2.jpg

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.

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.

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.

It's trash on Mars but hopefully data for spaceX and Nasa

With a nod to the BBC's Ashes to Ashes and no trace of any reliability guarantees, http://ptscientist.com/ might be willing to "fire up the quattro" on realative short notice.

(Would be a shame if contemporary car brand rivalry was a bigger hindrance to cooperation in space exploration than cold war rivalry was in the days of the Apollo/Soyuz docking)

I wouldn't bet on that. What they're building is a vehicle that conveys things to Mars. If that massive problem is being handled, entities like NASA are free to focus on what they want to put on Mars. If SpaceX is just ferrying NASA's shit, I'd bet we'll see more than trash inside Red Dragon.

Not for the first launch we won't. They might get something a cut over an rc car with an iphone taped to the top, but with the time line suggested there is no way to slap together something that will do anything new: the trip will be purely to show the trip can be done, and not contribute very much for science.

I guess we'll see.

Who said they are starting now? SpaceX was founded for the purpose of getting to Mars.

Yeah, but "science" is not something they put in the name of their departments.

Nor will you find something like a "planetary protection engineer" among their open positions.

Though they will comply with Planetary Protection under space treaty.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/725367703045730304

Regardless, just landing "trash on Mars" would be a pretty damn big accomplishment for SpaceX, and what I meant by "paving the way" for future missions.

And yeah, as aerovistae said, there may be other organizations like NASA who have instruments already ready or nearly ready to go.

I bet they could put a Hydrogen/Oxygen recovery system in it, though. So that, 2 years later, the arrive Mars-landers have fuel for a return trip.

Was JCSAT a pure "put trash on a boat" mission?

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?

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

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

Ha no! Ah well a bit late now!

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.

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.

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