SpaceX is making some serious progress lately. While the 2016 U.S. presidential race was sucking all the air out of the news this week, Elon Musk’s company managed its second booster landing on a barge, the third successful recovery of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle. From the BBC:
This latest effort was all the more impressive however because the rocket was carrying much more speed when it made its return.
SpaceX officials have said that recovering boosters used on missions that orbit geostationary satellites will always be more difficult because of the high velocity required to put those platforms in the right part of the sky.
On confirmation of the latest landing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the joke: "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar."
While Musk is on track to reduce launch costs by a significant amount, he also has bigger targets in his sights. From Slate’s Bad Astronomy:
My very first thought when I read this was, “He thinks they can land a three-ton uncrewed Dragon capsule on Mars in the next couple of years? Something heavier than any other payload ever dropped on Mars, and from a company that hasn’t even sent anything anywhere near that far?”
Then I mulled it over for a moment. To my own astonishment, I realized, “Huh. Yeah. In fact they can do this.”
Now look, it won’t be easy, not by a long shot. But Musk’s claim isn’t out of the blue—SpaceX has been working toward this for years. What it comes down to is key pieces of technology still untested in flight but currently being developed, as well as SpaceX maintaining its current launch schedule.
But in the end, it’s feasible that in a few years, a Dragon capsule will sit on the surface of Mars*.
Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explains how SpaceX is pursuing a strategy of incremental, scalable development of its Falcon boosters and Dragon capsules. For example, the same rockets intended for emergency capsule separation during a launch for the manned version of the Dragon capsule can also be used for an unmanned soft landing on Mars. Every launch SpaceX carries out builds on the previous missions and expands their knowledge base with real world experience.
Meanwhile, the latest Dragon supply capsule run to the International Space Station is nearing an end; NASA is planning to broadcast the capsule’s May 11 departure from the station, bringing cargo back down to Earth. It’s the only supply capsule designed to return to re-enter and land. It carried nearly 7,000 pounds of supplies up to the station on this mission, including an experimental inflatable habitat module.
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is an expandable habitat technology demonstration for the International Space Station. Expandable habitats greatly decrease the amount of transport volume for future space missions. These “expandables” are lightweight and require minimal payload volume on a rocket, but expand after being deployed in space to potentially provide a comfortable area for astronauts to live and work. They also provide a varying degree of protection from solar and cosmic radiation, space debris, atomic oxygen, ultraviolet radiation and other elements of the space environment.
Bigelow Aerospace has ambitious plans for the future. The inflatable technology being tested with the BEAM module could be developed into modular space stations, habitats on the moon, and elsewhere, and modules for missions between planets. The advantages of a package that be launched in compact form and then expanded to full volume, along with weight savings, are compelling — if it meets its tests.
For SpaceX, some critical tests coming up will be seeing how Dragon capsules and Falcon boosters perform after being refurbished and reused. Tests of the manned version of the Dragon capsule are planned for the some time in the next 2-3 years. Tests of the Falcon Heavy will also be moving ahead. (Of course, NASA has its own plans for Mars with the SLS system and the Orion Capsule.)
The Final Frontier — it’s still waiting, but it’s becoming more attainable every day.