SpaceX to fly to International Space Station in November
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While they are doing all of this they need to develop their heavy lift rocket as fast as possible with the goal of landing a man on mars within 10 years. Elon Musk himself said a few days ago that we need to go to mars and it is possible for them to do this "as early as 2018". The reason for the quick timeline is because funding and political slaughter for space programs is more likely to happen as time goes on and as new presidents come in or some new economic trouble happens.
Following the success of the ISS, going to Mars should be an international endavour. It needs to be a goal not for one country, but the whole human race to become a multi-planetary species and go to Mars.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t...
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/ji9e1/review_of_t...
Juno was recently launched aboard an Atlas V, which launches for roughly the same price as the Falcon Heavy will in a year or so's time. Juno gets placed into an orbit that will take it out beyond Mars' orbit, before returning to the Earth for a gravity-assist flyby. The flyby is necessary to double the payload that they could otherwise send to Jupiter.
Falcon Heavy can left 3 times the payload of an Atlas V, so Juno could have increased in size, and avoided the 2 and a half years it will take to execute the Earth flyby manoeuvre, all for the same price. Alternatively, a spacecraft 3 times the weight of Juno (which weighed in at 8000 pounds / 3500Kg) could be sent direct to Mars.
What could you do with all of that? Well, the Mars Direct mission requires about 140 000kg, to be assembled in orbit. That's about 14 Falcon Heavy launches, which has a total price tag of about US$1.4 billion. Of course, on top of that there are in-orbit assembly costs, and the costs of the actual Mars-bound hardware, - which would roughly double the price tag to US$3 billion. Without Falcon Heavy, that mission cost is doubled to US$ 6 billion.
I wonder what Juno would have looked like if it had three times the payload to play with...
But this is definitely possible even with nasa's reduced budget now that the shuttle is retired.
edit: Pointing out that NASA is not likely to keep the funding is not the same as bringing up politics. Pointing out the likely factions responsible for it would be bringing up politics, but I didn't. Because it would be better suited for a whole new submission, not a long tree here.
The Falcon Heavy can throw ~ 53 t into a low-Earth orbit, and its list price is 80–125 M$ (http://www.spacex.com/falcon_heavy.php).
So yes, three launches, not 14, making the total cost for Mars Direct less than US$2 billion. But I made the same mistake for Atlas calculations, so it still ends up costing 3 times as much in launch costs...
On a sidenote, why is that the case? Sure, SpaceX is a US-based company, but why does that mean that they can't hire non-US citizens with visas etc? What export regulations are they - and come to think of it, what are they exporting?
Many space technologies are listed as munitions in the US, and revealing information about those technologies to foreigners counts as export. There are exceptions, and you can get export licenses (companies routinely do), but hiring non-Americans would be a pain—American employees wouldn't be able to share much information with them!
p.s. Under ITAR, all you need is a green card. I don't know if that's good enough for SpaceX—they might be under other restrictions than ITAR, too.
More info here http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php
It’s quite amazing, really. The Dragon spacecraft is much more awesome than Progress. It can get more than double the payload to the ISS. More importantly, though, Dragon can bring half of that back to earth. There is no spacecraft that can currently do that. The Space Shuttle could but not anymore and Soyuz is pretty much only good for bringing back people and not cargo.
And it’s still comparable in cost or cheaper than Progress (which is a truly mature and tested spacecraft)? That’s quite astonishing.
In 2007, NASA got a deal for $719 million for 5.6 tons and 15 seats. Seats on Soyuz now cost ~$60 million a piece, or $900 million just for 15 seats. The price for cargo then probably also increased.
That said, SpaceX is doing exciting things more affordably than we did them before, so it’s hardly puzzling.
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You know, I was going to write a lengthy explanation of what that means for your examples, but I'm late for work, and it's on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
But suffice to say, there's no natural monopoly in space flight, and they're getting paid (by both the private and public sector) for their services, so space flight isn't a public good (anymore at least).
Private transportation systems are not really equivalent.
Moreover, privatization in and of itself is very often an excuse to throw money to cronies - certainly the case with Blackwater in particular; a mercenary costs hundreds of thousands a year to replace $30K or so in support costs for a regular military person. Just calling something "privatization" is usually enough for knee-jerk libertarians to assume it's saving you money - when it's just another item in the ol' kleptocracy toolkit.
Privatization as a concept also takes a hit from the bone-stupid idea of privatizing Social Security - which is just another way of passing risk on to the little guy while making sure our friends in the financial industry get to buy bigger yachts.
Privatization in the space industry really does save money - but much, much more importantly, it's the logical next step in making sure space technology gets viable. Long past time to get the free market involved there.
1: The real kind, where the government simply stops doing an activity (or does it too ineffectively) and a market appears out of opportunity - like SpaceX. Libertarians like this because it makes the government smaller.
2: The fake kind, where a government decides that something it does should now be done by a private entity under contract. Blackwater is one example, most privatized railways are another. These seem to port the annoying bits from government (the private operator is accountable to the government, not the "customer", and there is still no competition) and while the typically predictable cost is good for budgeting, the real benefit is too often in keeping politicians' fingers out of day-to-day operations. Most libertarians would prefer you'd just get the governments hands out of the operation altogether.
So yes, it is easier to build a settlement than to terraform, but I don't think you could justify the cost to build a self-sufficient settlement. Heck, if we start running out of land to settle on on Earth, there's always the sea to settle, which requires many of the same engineering considerations to settle but at much lower cost to get us there and do trade with the rest of the planet. I suspect we'll be seeing either underwater or raft-based settlements long before we see settlements on Mars.
(I feel like I should be using terms like "minimum viable settlement" around here!)
While I think that we're still a good ways from pushing this planet to it's limit (at assuming renewable energies come online quickly enough to mitigate population growth), eventually we'll want more room. And living in contained units (underwater, in space, or on other planets, ) doesn't seem like a worthwhile solution. So we're either talking population control or making more livable space. Surely, a thousand years into the future, we don't want to only have one livable planet to our race. And (maybe I'm wrong but,) terraforming what we have seems more likely that traveling to other Earth-like planets.
I'm not crazy enough to think that this is something we can overcome easily, or during my lifetime, but I think it's more of a "if we don't get started now, when?" type issue.
bonus you get tons of raw spaceship materials already up and out of our gravity well