SpaceX announced today that it has plans to send one of its Dragon space capsules to the surface of
The company says it will reveal more about its Martian colonization plans later this year. But Mars has always been in the forefront of SpaceX founder Elon Musk's plans.
The "Red Dragon" missions would be a project that SpaceX would undertake on its own, not with
Launching a spaceship to Mars is an incredibly ambitious goal for a private company. But how feasible is their schedule?
"SpaceX has a record of making really ambitious plans, and then experiencing some slight delays," Bill Ostrove, an analyst with Foresight International told me. "Going to Mars is a bit of a different animal, because a delay of a few weeks could mean that they would miss a once-every-two-year window. That could encourage them to value speed more, even at the risk of lower chance of mission success. Or it means that if they miss the 2018 window, they won't be able to try again until 2020."
The mission doesn't have any paying customers - it's a self-financed venture for the company. So that would at least take the pressure off of SpaceX to meet any time commitments at the risk of the mission and give it more flexibility with respect to deciding whether it's ready.
One major factor in the feasibility of the timeframe is the fact that the mission will be using the company's Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the Dragon to Mars. First announced in 2011, with planned test flights in 2012 or 2013, the Falcon Heavy rocket hasn't yet flown in the air. The company confirmed to FORBES that Falcon Heavy test flights are scheduled for later in 2016.
"The use of the Falcon Heavy also makes it more complicated, since it hasn't flown yet," said Ostrove. "The chances of the mission launching in 2018 will depend heavily on how successful the Falcon Heavy is in meeting its own development timeline."
Landing on Mars itself is also a tricky task - one that's caused several failures in the past. To get a safe landing for its Dragon on Mars, the spacecraft is equipped with rockets to take it to a soft landing. (The thin atmosphere on Mars makes parachutes harder to work with the bigger a spacecraft gets.) SpaceX is already testing those rockets to make a landing, and of course it's also seen success in landing first stages of its Falcon 9 rockets after use.
You can check out a video of a Dragon landing test below.
Whether SpaceX launches a Dragon in 2018 or a few years later, though, is likely irrelevant to SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, who's dead set on getting to the Red Planet.
In 2012, he told FORBES, "This is not the path to go to maximize riches. It’s a terrible risk-adjusted return. But it’s gotta happen. I think that for me and a lot of people, America is a nation of explorers. I’d like to see that we’re expanding the frontier and moving things forward. Space is the final frontier and we have to make progress."
