NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover

[NMNeil]

NASA now has 5 skateboards on Mars

[CraigyMc]

NMNeil said:

NASA now has 5 skateboards on Mars

And one hoverboard.

[Eric Mc]

Einion Yrth said:

I believe Falcon 1 was funded out of Musk's pocket. Admittedly U.S. Gov. funding followed close behind.

It was - but Musk is heavily dependent on NASA, and also the DoD, so government money is an important factor in what he does.

[Beati Dogu]

I've been having a play with the "Mission to Mars" Augmented Reality app on my iPad. Which is free.

amongst general information about Mars and the rovers, you can control augmented reality rovers like this one: a 1:6 scale Perseverance exploring the upper reaches of the bathroom floor. If you take it outside you can have it 1:1 scale.



You can also launch the Atlas V rocket and experience the "7 minutes of terror" of entry through the Mars atmosphere.

[Clive Milk]

SpaceX approach to LEO of trial and error works, when backed with lots of money. IT DOES NOT WORK FOR MARS.

It is a dead man walking. Just due to the distance.


The only way to go about it is the way NASA has, which is perfecting a scheme with few tries and a lot of background thought, hence the amazing way Perseverance was put down flawlessly.

Nasa have 9 out of 10 I believe now? Or 10 out of 11? I lose track. Whatever, it is far better than any other country has done.

[Clive Milk]

Beati Dogu said:

I've been having a play with the "Mission to Mars" Augmented Reality app on my iPad. Which is free.

amongst general information about Mars and the rovers, you can control augmented reality rovers like this one: a 1:6 scale Perseverance exploring the upper reaches of the bathroom floor. If you take it outside you can have it 1:1 scale.



You can also launch the Atlas V rocket and experience the "7 minutes of terror" of entry through the Mars atmosphere.

I hope I am not funding that with my pocket of Spanish Pesos that is slowly going down over the years I have noticed ...

[hidetheelephants]

Fundoreen said:

Our current fastest space probe would take 60000 years to get to the nearest star. many times longer than man has any history.
It wont be the stoneage rockets we still use that get us anywhere.
Maybe we will develop something in 100 years time and it will get to those stars before anything we launch now.
Some geezer in a thick spacesuit he cant take off is no better than a space probe to mars and robot lander.
Unless the photo op is important.
Instead of all the stupid tv shows that show someone running a lot to prepare for their space mission they should see if people
can live on the moon for a year first. The least disturbed can then go on the mars mission. I would expect all of them to drop out
to run home to mummy.
They tried some sealed self sufficent bubble on earth and they all kept nipping outside for a fag or had resources added from outside.
The bog stock reality of the mission is impressive enough to realistic people but they have to keep bullstting as all the people holding the purse strings are thick.

You don't do nuance, do you? The purpose of that experiment was to uncover what might go wrong with longterm missions; they achieved that objective and also demonstrated that it's a very complex problem but very much within the realm of the possible, albeit at the high risk end of the spectrum.

[14]

Clive Milk said:

SpaceX approach to LEO of trial and error works, when backed with lots of money. IT DOES NOT WORK FOR MARS.

It is a dead man walking. Just due to the distance.


The only way to go about it is the way NASA has, which is perfecting a scheme with few tries and a lot of background thought, hence the amazing way Perseverance was put down flawlessly.

Nasa have 9 out of 10 I believe now? Or 10 out of 11? I lose track. Whatever, it is far better than any other country has done.

SpaceX won’t be sending Starship to Mars until they are confident it will land on Mars safely. They won’t be using the same approach that they are using now for Starship, it’s too expensive to do so otherwise.

[rxe]

Clive Milk said:

SpaceX approach to LEO of trial and error works, when backed with lots of money. IT DOES NOT WORK FOR MARS.

It is a dead man walking. Just due to the distance.


The only way to go about it is the way NASA has, which is perfecting a scheme with few tries and a lot of background thought, hence the amazing way Perseverance was put down flawlessly.

Nasa have 9 out of 10 I believe now? Or 10 out of 11? I lose track. Whatever, it is far better than any other country has done.

We’ve covered this on the SpaceX thread - it will work fine.

Summary:

- The physics of propulsive landing will be well proven on earth which is a good test bed for Mars. Mars will be more rocket, less aero breaking, but we know what the atmosphere is made of and how thick it is to a good level of detail. The trial and error is being done right now, on earth.

- Getting to Mars is all about getting into orbit, and then adding enough velocity to coast there. Relighting your engine is the key skill - and they’ve demonstrated that hundreds of times. You also need to demonstrate relighting your engine after 6 months in space - they can do that in Earth orbit.

- Landing on an unprepared surface - big challenge. They are likely to need conventional landings first to build a landing pad.

Other than that, I don’t see the problem. Starship is so massive that you could have a machine shop and a load of ally stock in there to make whatever bits you need.

[Blackpuddin]

Clive Milk said:

Nasa have 9 out of 10 I believe now? Or 10 out of 11? I lose track. Whatever, it is far better than any other country has done.

Another flaw in this is the nationalism of it all. If we're going to do space exploration it should be a global effort. By keeping it nationalist we're just going to export all the same problems that it causes over here.

[Eric Mc]

Clive Milk said:

SpaceX approach to LEO of trial and error works, when backed with lots of money. IT DOES NOT WORK FOR MARS.

It is a dead man walking. Just due to the distance.


The only way to go about it is the way NASA has, which is perfecting a scheme with few tries and a lot of background thought, hence the amazing way Perseverance was put down flawlessly.

Nasa have 9 out of 10 I believe now? Or 10 out of 11? I lose track. Whatever, it is far better than any other country has done.

NASA have lost more than one Mars probe.

By my memory, I can think of -

Mariner 3
Mariner 8
Mars Polar Lander
Mars Climate Orbiter

The last one listed was the one which was sent off course by sending a signal to the spacecraft which contained erroneous velocity change instructions due to a mix up between metric and imperial measures.

[Leithen]

Eric Mc said:

NASA have lost more than one Mars probe.

By my memory, I can think of -

Mariner 3
Mariner 8
Mars Polar Lander
Mars Climate Orbiter

The last one listed was the one which was sent off course by sending a signal to the spacecraft which contained erroneous velocity change instructions due to a mix up between metric and imperial measures.

That must be the mistake that haunts every probe team.

[Eric Mc]

I'm sure it does.

Getting the numbers wrong on a space mission usually means it all ends in failure. The first launch of the Ariane 5 ended with the rocket tumbling out of control due to the wrong numeric instructions being programmed into the guidance system.

[MartG]

Clive Milk said:

SpaceX approach to LEO of trial and error works, when backed with lots of money. IT DOES NOT WORK FOR MARS.

It is a dead man walking. Just due to the distance.


The only way to go about it is the way NASA has, which is perfecting a scheme with few tries and a lot of background thought,

NASA has been planning manned Mars missions since the mid-1960 and has got precisely nowhere - that's nearly 60 years of effort with nothing to show but a lot of very nice artist's impressions, and design studies which someone once described as 'the most expensive science fiction on the planet'

SpaceX has gone from nothing to test flying a spacecraft capable of reaching Mars with a crew in less than a third of that time.

Now tell me again which approach is working ?

[CrutyRammers]

Eric Mc said:

I'm sure it does.

Getting the numbers wrong on a space mission usually means it all ends in failure. The first launch of the Ariane 5 ended with the rocket tumbling out of control due to the wrong numeric instructions being programmed into the guidance system.

One of the all-time classic typing errors. Trying to put a 64 bit number into a 16 bit variable.

[Smiljan]

MartG said:

NASA has been planning manned Mars missions since the mid-1960 and has got precisely nowhere - that's nearly 60 years of effort with nothing to show but a lot of very nice artist's impressions, and design studies which someone once described as 'the most expensive science fiction on the planet'

SpaceX has gone from nothing to test flying a spacecraft capable of reaching Mars with a crew in less than a third of that time.

Now tell me again which approach is working ?

SpaceX hasn’t gone from nothing, they have all the experience and knowledge from all of the decades of development.

They didn’t just start from scratch and ignore all of the research testing and development that had gone before them.

[eharding]

Smiljan said:

MartG said:

NASA has been planning manned Mars missions since the mid-1960 and has got precisely nowhere - that's nearly 60 years of effort with nothing to show but a lot of very nice artist's impressions, and design studies which someone once described as 'the most expensive science fiction on the planet'

SpaceX has gone from nothing to test flying a spacecraft capable of reaching Mars with a crew in less than a third of that time.

Now tell me again which approach is working ?

SpaceX hasn’t gone from nothing, they have all the experience and knowledge from all of the decades of development.

They didn’t just start from scratch and ignore all of the research testing and development that had gone before them.

The goal of SpaceX is to revolutionise the space launch market by the use of low-cost reusable vehicles, leverage that technology to build a global LEO internet system, and use the revenue from that to get to Mars.

The goal of NASA is to ensure the continued existence of NASA, and seeks to justify that with various projects of differing merit. That isn't to say there aren't brilliant engineers and scientists at NASA, or that they don't produce some stunning scientific results, but NASA is no longer the organisation that put man on the Moon, and I doubt they now have the dynamism to put man anywhere other than in low orbit, or ever will again.

[Smiljan]

Maybe take a minute to read up on just what all the other companies are doing as well as SpaceX.

NASA clearly have a well developed program to return manned flights to the Moon. Have a read up on the Artemis program.

All is not roses and champagne at Space X, their contract for the a single satellite was over $300 million dollars almost 3 times some previous launches which needed robust defending. Not exactly budget.

Let's not forget this little nugget, fancy lawyers failed again.

https://spacenews.com/case-closed-california-judge...

There is a lot of competition.

I'd agree NASA is very different now but I find it amusing for you to describe it the way you do.

Edited by Smiljan on Saturday 27th February 15:36

[eharding]

Smiljan said:

Maybe take a minute to read up on just what all the other companies are doing as well as SpaceX.

NASA clearly have a well developed program to return manned flights to the Moon. Have a read up on the Artemis program.

I'm aware of the efforts of other companies as well as other nation states - China in particular - in the area, but my reply was in the context of your comments on the merits of SpaceX vs NASA.

You'll note that NASA's "well developed program" to return to the Moon was originally planned for 2028, but that Pence decided in 2019 that having a Moon landing one election cycle earlier would play well for whoever Trump was anointing as his successor in 2024 (at least, that was the plan....and who do you think Vice President Pence had a notion of who that should be?), and hence arbitrarily brought the date forward by four years, not that he had a clue how that could happen, and neither did NASA, but since 2028 was a vague placeholder date anyway, NASA didn't really have any comeback since if they could pluck a date out of their arse then there was no reason why Pence couldn't pull an earlier one out of his arse that he liked the sound of better.

Not that everyone else in the business doesn't have wildly optimistic timescales on occasions, but they're not politically paralysed bureaucracies to anywhere near the same extent as NASA, for whom, as I've said above, the journey is the goal, and keeping it dragging on until someone calls a halt, and then start all over again. Artemis itself is largely cobbled together from parts of previously cancelled programmes, and I wouldn't be surprised if the current incarnation suffers the same fate.

[Smiljan]

Ok, SpaceX are heavily involved in the Artemis program but never mind.