Nibb31

"the" unpressurized variant ? That would require a whole new design. I'm pretty sure that most of the equipment is designed with air cooling in mind and isn't vacuum hardened. It's already a custom design. Any resemblance between a vehicle designed for landing on Mars and a crew capsule is superficial.

At 3:34, it looks like somebody forgot to lock the access door at the bottom of the launch table...

Does not compute. Cost per seat is determined by the total cost, not the other way round. NASA is paying~$160 million for each Dragon 2 flight on a Falcon 9. A cargo Falcon 9 flight is supposed to be $60 million, so that puts the cost of a Dragon 2 spacecraft at $100 million. Manned or not makes no difference, and this is a specially-modified one-off with a lot of specific development, so is likely to be more expensive. So stick a Dragon 2 on top of a Falcon Heavy, and you get $100 + $150 million. Add development cost for modifications (solar panels, navigation and long range comms systems, landing software, mission planning and simulation, planetary protection, new trunk, etc...) and you'll be way beyond $300 million before you even add any actual science equipment. I'd say a total mission cost of $500 isn't far off the mark.

Sure, it costs, but if it's a requirement, then it has to be there. However, I'm not sure that a payload fairing is enough to enforce planetary protection standards. Interplanetary payloads need to be packaged in a sterile white room (typically, the payload is encapsulated separately from the from the launch fairing. I'm not sure if SpaceX's payload processing facilities and procedures are compatible.

This will be unmanned, so no need for a LES. Crewed Dragon to Mars is not going to happen.

How can you have missed that ? No, there is nothing yet, not even powerpoint slides. It was supposed to be announced last year, but now it's september, or october, or 2017...

I think that if you want to get 4-tons of payload to the surface of Mars, there are much better ways than to hack a crew vehicle. You would be far better off with a specialized vehicle. You only need the heatshield and the SuperDracos. Pretty much all the rest of the vehicle is wasted mass and limits the capabilities. You would be better off without the pressure vessel and aeroshell in the first place. That would allow you to add as much science equipment as you want, solar panels, and ever deploy rovers. And in the end, you would end up with a lander that looks like Viking or MPL. The only advantage of Red Dragon compared to a SuperDraco-derived specialized lander is PR. It makes the false pretense that Dragon could be used to send people to Mars, which it most certainly can't, at least not on its own, and not with any return capability. I don't buy the 2018 date. SpaceX hardly ever delivers on-time. They regularly throw out ideas and abandon them when they figure out that it's going to be harder than they thought, or they lose focus as they turn to some other of Musk's crazy ideas or get forced back into the reality of their customer backlog. This is going to require a Falcon Heavy at least, probably with the Raptor upper-stage, and a Dragon V2, none of which have flown yet. The Dragon is going to need a lot of modifications, including navigation systems (currently GPS-based). And there is also the planetary protection problem that popeter45 evoked and will probably make it a non-starter when NASA gets involved.

I'm pretty sure Musk claimed that the Falcon 9 first stage could go SSTO.

And the Merlin engine was based on a NASA reference design.

Added affordable

...who might also be somewhat naive and inexperienced. Aside from KSP, what is their experience in the aerospace sector? in hi-tech economy? global politics? People who have been observing the industry for decades tend to be more jaded. We've been promised so much for so long. For 50 years, Mars has always been 30 years away, and it still is. We were supposed to have a reusable Space Shuttle by the 70s, ring space stations in the 80s, SSTO's in the 90s, affordable space tourist rides in the 00s. We've seen so many "new space" companies rise and fall, that it's hard to be blindly enthusiastic about anything. So yeah, I take everything Musk (or Bezos, Branson, Allen, and all those other over-optimistic space entrepreneurs) says with a pinch of salt. I think the younger generation tends to lack that pinch of critical thinking and takes everything they read on twitter for granted.

Sure, but qualified engineers and technicians tend to be specialized. Additionally, the manufacturing folks work at Hawthorne whereas the refurb work will likely be done at the launch sites. People are not completely interchangeable. You're not going to have a painter do payload integration, or get a software engineer to come down do a hydraulic purge between two lines of code. Fast turnaround only makes sense if you are flying frequently. Even at several times the current flight rate, it's not worth the extra effort.

Homo Sapiens is only about 200000 years old, and civilization is only a few thousand years old. That's a flash in the pan at the scales that OP is talking about. Given how fast we have transformed our own environment in such a short time, I doubt that we are much more than a biological wave that's burning through the Earth's resources. We are on the verge of being able to transform our own biology and to migrate into virtuality. I don't see us colonizing other worlds when we can create other worlds in silicon. I don't think Homo Sapiens will be around a few thousand years. None of our growth curves are sustainable. Either we will have gone extinct or we will have muted into some sort Homo Futuris or Homo Virtualis that our puny brains couldn't even start to comprehend, who will look back at us like we look back at Lucy.

My first wording was something more akin to "Physics are a female dog"...

Does it even matter ? Does Boeing or General Electric care about having a fan base ? Don't get me wrong, I admire their actual achievements and they have done a lot to make space more affordable for governments and corporations. Their work on reusability is innovative and impressive. I just don't drink the kool-aid and I can't stand the lack of critical thinking from the fanboy brigade. Kids, don't take everything anybody tells you for granted.

Do you really need a new thread for this ? Just about every thread naturally evolves into a SpaceX thread already. SpaceX is a commercial launch provider, not a space program. Their business is to launch stuff into space for paying customers, mainly for the government. They manage to be cheaper than their competition, mainly due to a lean organization and cheap wages. They also surf on their PR machine, which gains them a cultish support from a young starry-eyed fan base. They do tend to hype up some ideas to feed them into the PR machine, and then lose focus and drop them, and they have a habit of delaying stuff.

Well. Physics are cruel. People are people. Economics suck. Those are the main reasons space is hard, and you can't change it.

Not really. A tech team that works only a few days per month costs more that a team that is busy all month. That doesn't make turnaround a major requirement.

lol. Why would you need robot hologram/vendors when you have a whole population of people doing nothing? Why do you need shops if nobody works ? Does your ship have an economy ? What is it based on ? What wealth can be created in a closed loop environment ? Also, having a single floor for work, another for shopping, another for work, etc... means that you get traffic jams between each area on shift rotation hours. Have you never played Sim City ? 4 of each animal ? That's just as silly as Noah's ark's 2 of each animal. That's not enough to develop a viable population of anything. And every animal on Earth ? There are 8.7 million species on Earth, and we only know about 10% of them.

I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned yet that REL does have a design for a hypersonic airliner, the LAPCAT A2 (I have to wonder where these guys pick their names), powered by a SABRE engine variant called the SCIMITAR. Anyway, they proposed it back in 2008, but nobody seems interested. So I guess there probably isn't a market for it.

It's a clever idea, but I don't think such a market exists. For freight, air transport is already only really viable for perishable goods or parcels. Parcels spend more time in triage centers and trucks than they do on the plane. In most cases, logistics companies seek regularity and cost rather than speed. I don't think there are many cases where it makes a difference if cargo takes 6 hours to arrive rather than 24 hours on a regular plane route. For passengers, the time required to get to the airport, go through customs and check-in also means that the difference between a hypersonic and a supersonic flight is negligeable.

Nope. Realistic.

I think that even if the price was similar to an Everest trek (~$50K) the amount of customers every year wouldn't be much higher (~1000). the general appeal is probably at a similar level. Even if you managed to sell twice as many tickets, that would only give you a total annual revenue of ~$100 million. For a week stay, you would need a hotel offering that can accomodate 40 tourists every week, and a launch infrastructure that can launch 40 people per week, plus supplies and commercial crew, for less than $2 million. I really don't see how the tourism business case could ever close.

No, the digitisation project was done years ago and is available at the links I posted before. This is just a mass upload to Flickr.

If it's floating in international waters, it's considered a ship under maritime law. If they do not fly a flag of convenience, they don't benefit from any national protection, and can be subject to acts of piracy. So you're going to need to add paramilitary protection to the list of public services. So you just include the taxes in the rent. They are still taxes. No it wouldn't. You would be outside of your country's jurisdiction, so maritime law would apply. In most cases, the ship's captain is the highest authority (which makes your floating city a dictatorial regime).