Elon Musk basically said his biggest fear was if it exploded on the launch pad it could destroy the pad. He said if it cleared the tower, he would consider the test a success. Better put a hold on that Mars vacation though. That would be the worst vacation ever. I still think everyone (including Musk and NASA) is underestimating how hard it would be to land humans on Mars and return them to Earth safely by orders of magnitude.
and why, not sure why anybody would want to go there
Yep. Today was a big success. I mean he carried a condo-sized ship into space.
If we were meant to stay in one place we'd have roots instead of feet. If we were meant to stay close to home, we'd have never ridden a horse or invented the wheel. If we were never meant to cross the oceans, our boats would have never floated. We have explored every inch of this big blue marble and now it's time to check out the red one.
We gotta hurry. We've only got 210 years before James Tiberius Kirk is born.
You might be surprised. Getting back to the moon is a rehearsal. With 60's technology it only took 7 years from the time JFK said we are going to the moon. I think all the details of going to Mars is part of all the rehearsal. There is a local company in Jackson that has a LLP in SpaceX. They bought in for 31 million. I believe their ownership is worth around 71 million. I met some of the Space X guys at the GA game this last season. They were there as a guest of that company.
And if they survive the radiation, there's the problem of slowing down a spacecraft that big and heavy and landing it on Mars in a way that the landing doesn't kill the crew. As of now, they have no idea how to solve that problem.
My uncle is one of them. If he has said it once, he's said it a million times: the government bureaucrats f*ed up NASA.
The guys in the 60’s took more risk. Maybe not a lot of risk but more. We were more willing to strap a brave soul to a repurposed missile with a tin can up top in those days. Trying to get a calc package through nasa nowadays is tough.
A lady from my town (Barbara Morgan) taught at our elementary school and was the other teacher selected with Christa McAuliffe in 1985 for the initial Teachers In Space Program (TISP.) She was the backup for Christa and was supposed to go on her own mission in 86'. After Challenger, the TISP was scrapped.
You know there already Dollar Generals there, right. I’d bet they are much more organized and tidy, too!
Maybe so, but as @Darryl Steight points out, we know from the movies that there are no 3 tittied mermaids down there.
I disagree. It really isn't that difficult, but having enough fuel is. The rocket equation cannot be cheated.
that’s the easy part. Keeping them alive & healthy in a confined high radiation environment for 2 years and finding a way to slow the spacecraft down & land gently enough to not kill them is the problem.
There’s a pretty good podcast that’s been discussing this with the folks at Johnson who have been working on the mars landing systems. The podcast is called “Houston we have a podcast”. They release an episode about once a week and the mars stuff took up most of March. I encourage all that may be interested in this thread to listen to those episodes.
