Billionaire futurist Elon Musk has long dreamt
of human colonies on Mars, but the exact steps
to get there have always been a bit vague.
Now, he has announced that SpaceX may land
its Dragon 2 spacecraft on the Red Planet
as soon as 2018.
That's right, in just two years we might well
see the first private Mars landing in history
-- the first big step in Musk's epic dream
for an off-world colony. Dubbed the Red Dragon
Mars Mission, SpaceX intends the endeavor
to serve as the first test flight of the upgraded
capsule -- a capsule, according to Musk, designed
to land anywhere in the solar system. Its
predecessor, the Dragon 1 capsule, made history
in 2012 when it became the first commercial
spacecraft to successfully deliver cargo to
and from the International Space Station.
They hope to start moving human cargo over
the next couple of years. Now you're probably
wondering, "why 2018?" Well, it all comes
down to what scientists call "Mars Oppositions,"
convergences in the orbits of Mars and Earth
that shorten the distance between the two
worlds by hundreds of millions of miles. The
maximum distance between the two planets is
a colossal 250 million miles with the sun
between us. The average distance is more like
140 million miles, but the closest possible
distance is a tantalizing 33.9 million miles.
July 27, 2018 will give us 35.8, which ain't
bad at all. We won't beat that again until
the year 2035 -- and then only by about half a million miles. The Mars Opposition window is important,
but the hard part won't be GETTING to the
red planet, it'll be successfully landing
-- tricky task no matter who you are. Much
like the Curiosity rover's nail-biting decent
in 2012, Dragon 2 will hover down to the surface
via eight hover rockets -- dubbed its SuperDraco
propulsive landing system, which SpaceX has
already tested planetside. Still, a great
deal of work remains to be done -- and Musk
intends to announce more details later this
year. But if successful, SpaceX could very
well be on the way to hitting Musk's previously-touted
2025 goal for human Mars Exploration -- beating
NASA to the honors by decades.
How do you envision humanity's Martian future?
Which will come to fruition first, Musk's
Dragon 2 or James Cameron's Avatar 2? Let
us know and if you crave more weird science
wonder, be sure to visit now.Howstuffworks.com
each and every day.
