14 DAY TRIAL // Mankind's very survival is entirely dependent on us colonizing other planets and moons, officials at Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) believe. To that end, they are intent on constructing a spacecraft that can fly to Mars.
The researchers say that their Dragon unmanned space capsule could easily be converted into a vehicle capable of taking a human crew to the Red Planet and back. In fact, flights using this capsule could be made regularly, so that progress is hastened.
SpaceX is currently working with the American space agency, under a Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) contract that calls for it to develop a spacecraft capable of delivering astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Falcon 9 medium-lift delivery system and the Dragon space capsule were developed specifically for this task, but now the company plans to extend their uses even further. SpaceX was started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who is now the company's CEO.
“Ultimately, the thing that is super-important in the grand scale of history is, are we on a path to becoming a multiplanet species or not? If we're not, well, that's not a very bright future. We'll simply be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us,” he said recently.
Musk was speaking on Monday, August 1, at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which was held in San Diego, California, Space reports.
At this time, NASA has plans to put astronauts on a near-Earth object (NEO) by 2025 and to have a crew fly to Mars by the 2030s. SpaceX plans to reach the Red Planet within 10 to 20 years, considerably faster than the American space agency believes is possible.
In order to send a spacecraft the size of Dragon to Mars, SpaceX will be using the Falcon Heavy delivery system, which is made up of three Falcon 9 first stages and a single upper stage. This massive rocket features a total of 27 Merlin engines, nine on each first stage.
Engineers at the company estimate that the first Falcon Heavy will fly at the end of 2012, or in the early months of 2013. The Dragon space capsule has already completed a successful test flight. A second trial is scheduled to take place later this year.
At the same time, SpaceX is also in talks with NASA about supplying a Dragon capsule for a deep space mission the agency plans to conduct some 150 to 200 astronomical units (AU) away. An AU is the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun, 93 million miles (157 million kilometers).