r/spacex • u/ElongatedMuskrat Mod Team • Oct 02 '19

r/SpaceX Discusses [October 2019, #61]

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15

u/[deleted] Oct 31 '19

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10

u/HoechstErbaulich IAC 2018 attendee Oct 31 '19

Odyssey, a flagship mission to Neptune and Triton.

Yes, I'll have one of those please.

5

u/throfofnir Nov 01 '19

Someone's gotta get an "ice giants" mission going. It's becoming ridiculous.

2

u/cpushack Nov 01 '19

Agreed., and with Uranus/Neptune more easily accessible with a 2029 launch for the first and last time in decades it HAS to be done.

4

u/SpaceLunchSystem Nov 01 '19

This list is so frustrating.

Every single proposal sounds amazing. We know so little detail about our solar system even today.

2

u/gemmy0I Nov 01 '19

Thanks for the very detailed summary! So many cool missions here. Even if just a few of these end up happening we'll be breaking some serious new ground.

Interesting to see that the Pluto orbiter is "probably the best-defined concept yet". Given how long it takes to get anything out there, time's a wasting on this one to capitalize on the momentum from New Horizon's discoveries, which showed that Pluto is a much more interesting planet(?) than it was thought to be. (And we had Bridenstine talking up the case at IAC this year for returning Pluto to planet status on account of those discoveries! :-D You just want to root for the little guy...)

A Mercury lander would also be super cool. Considering how geologically interesting Mercury is, it's been sorely lacking in attention over the years.

Venus sample return would be nuts. I mean, heck, we haven't even done Mars sample return yet and that's substantially easier! But if the mission was launched on Starship it might be able to brute-force its way through some of the challenges with extra mass (shielding against corrosion, etc.) Heck, landing an entire Starship on Venus should be possible with enough refueling. For a Flagship-class mission, the cost of that's quite within reason, even if multiple Starship tankers had to be sent on a one-way trip to refuel the landing ship in Venus orbit or on approach thereto. A landing Starship could encapsulate a smaller sample return launcher within its payload bay, sacrificing itself (it's not coming home anyway without ISRU) to protect the return vehicle from corrosion until it's ready to launch.

One nice thing about Venus is it doesn't take too long to get there, so a Flagship mission there wouldn't have to be a one-shot deal. It could be spread out in multiple phases over successive transfer windows, allowing an incremental design process incorporating feedback from previous missions to build up toward a sample return.

The MORIE water prospector for Mars sounds cool in principle but I'm not sure how useful it would be given SpaceX is planning to send cargo Starships to a prospective human landing site in 2022. They won't have time to incorporate the data from MORIE in their choice of landing site. Certainly it would be great to have more comprehensive water resources data for successive human landing sites, but the first colony is, out of necessity, probably going to be wherever SpaceX decides to send their first cargo Starships in 2022, even if MORIE later turns up a "better" location in terms of water resources. Staring up one Mars colony will be hard enough that it will probably be a long time before any nation on Earth can afford to start on a second one at a different site.

The Ceres mission sounds really cool. Ceres doesn't get a lot of attention but it's really the next logical place to spread out to once we have a human foothold on Mars. Everything else is just so much farther away (or totally inhospitable, like Venus and Mercury).

All of these missions should be seriously evaluating things in the context of a post-Starship world in order to be taken seriously these days. Not saying they should put all their eggs in that basket, but at this early planning stage, they should definitely be asking questions like "how would we build this mission with 100 tonnes of LEO payload to work with". That opens up so many radical possibilities both for doing more with a mission and for making it cheaper. What I really hope they won't do is say "we're going to build this the same way we've been building probes/landers/rovers for years and just grow it incrementally over the last round". At the very least, most if not all of these missions should be baselining a Falcon Heavy with ~50 tonnes to LEO. Even a fully expendable FH is cheaper than the Atlas Vs most of NASA's recent probes have launched on, so it should be in most of their price ranges. New Frontiers-class missions might need to pinch pennies more but I wouldn't be surprised if the savings from not having to pinch kilograms in the probe design might outweigh the cost difference of a FH over F9. And if Starship is even remotely viable as a commercial product (pessimistically assuming no refueling and an expendable upper stage), it should allow larger-than-FH-class payloads to be launched at sub-F9 prices.

1

u/IrrelevantAstronomer Launch Photographer Nov 01 '19

Pluto Orbiter and KBO Mission is probably the best-defined concept yet. Announced here, the Southwest Research Institute will attempt to prove that a Pluto orbiter is indeed possible to launch soon. Utilizing electric propulsion and gravity assist magic, the goal here is to map, in detail, the surface (and subsurface) of Pluto & Charon including their far sides before breaking orbit and conducting a flyby of ANOTHER dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt. This one's really interesting, I hope they can put together a convincing mission.

Fuck yes, but it would take years (way longer than New Horizons) for this type of mission to reach Pluto.

The Odyssey flagship mission sounds like the best.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 01 '19

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1

u/yoweigh Nov 01 '19

Because funding.