Will SpaceX Successfully Land a Rocket on a Boat?

[tom aaron]

You can stop progress completely with reality checks that are pessimistic enough.
2040 is 25 years away. 25 years before Apollo 11, the first unmanned V2 rockets reached space (but not orbits).
3 to 6. We can, but sometimes we might have to send more rockets than planned because no technology is 100% reliable.

Man on Mars maybe by 2075 or so.

Apollo is peanuts next to a Mars mission. Also, there is not a technological infrastructure ready to take on such a mission. There are not warehouses full of engineers and other warehouses full of piles of money all ready to start churning away if the President and Congress gave the green light.

We are at stage zero. No launch vehicles, no spacecraft , no habitation, no anything. Stage zero. We are grasping at straws trying to just find a reliable means of servicing an orbiting ISS.

 

[phinds]

Tom,

The whole Mars landing thing has been totally beaten to a pulp on this forum. Try a forum search. I think the consensus agrees w/ you. I certainly do. There are a few Pollyannas who still think it may happen in the next couple of decades but I'd like to have some of what they're smoking.

 

[mfb]

Apollo is peanuts next to a Mars mission.

So is a suborbital rocket compared to Apollo.
No anything is the situation of 1944. Now we have things. We launched missions to Mars - we even set up a communication infrastructure there for the rovers. We launched humans into space. We assembled things in orbit. We had humans living in space for more than a year at a time.
Mars is heavier and much farther away than the Moon, sure. But we have much more than the Apollo program had in 1944. It would need a strong political will, for sure. Not necessarily from the US.

I'm not saying it will happen, but I cannot rule it out. In the same way you probably would have claimed in 1944 that a manned mission to moon within 25 years is completely impossible.

 

[tom aaron]

So is a suborbital rocket compared to Apollo.
No anything is the situation of 1944. Now we have things. We launched missions to Mars - we even set up a communication infrastructure there for the rovers. We launched humans into space. We assembled things in orbit. We had humans living in space for more than a year at a time.
Mars is heavier and much further away than the Moon, sure. But we have much more than the Apollo program had in 1944. It would need a strong political will, for sure. Not necessarily from the US.

I'm not saying it will happen, but I cannot rule it out. In the same way you probably would have claimed in 1944 that a manned mission to moon within 25 years is completely impossible.

I don't know why anyone in 1944 would have said a manned mission to the Moon was impossible. It was within the engineering capabilities of known rocketry at the time. Engineering is not magic but rational application of technology.

Rovers are machines. Not organic human beings. There is no technology to send a man to Mars, get him there in a healthy state, sustain him for a stay and then return him to Earth. There are not teams of researchers available to do the basic science, develop the necessary technologies. We can barely recirculate water in the ISS for a few months without resupply...there is no room for error on a Mars mission. You don't need one water processing back up system but 5...and they all need to be tested in Martian conditions. Multiple pre human landers would be necessary, redundancies...pre mission non manned flights. None of which we have a scrap of technology to do.

In the 1960's there was an infrastructure of 'dirty hand' engineers who emerged from WW2. This is why the advances in nuclear energy and delivery systems was even more phenomenal than the Space missions. This type of infrastructure does not exist today. There are thousands of pieces of a puzzle that need to be developed and brought together...by who?

The JWST is minuscule in technological needs compared to a manned mission to Mars. It's a decade behind schedule and multiple times over budget. Multiply this a hundred times for what is needed to sustain a manned mission with zero room for error.

 

[mheslep]

... We are grasping at straws trying to just find a reliable means of servicing an orbiting ISS.

That assertion doesn't really survive a reality check given the ISS has continuously occupied for the last 14 years. One might as well resurrect "man was not meant to fly" come the next canceled plane flight.

 

[enorbet]

It seems to me that the number one reason that the odds may be higher that we don't put a man on Mars by 2040 or even 2075 for that matter is public will to fund the research needed. Whenever I see words like "eaten up resources" especially when applied to the exploration of space, I can't help it, I bristle. If we look at any graphic of government spending it should be obvious the odds are those funds wouldn't have been "eaten up" in any better endeavor, but more likely to go to another useless tank or bomber that will rust away without ever having been used or to be shuffled off the board into some Classified area so no records need be kept

... and the public as a whole applauds this and uses the Moon Landings not as a positive high water mark, a thing of pride that incidentally had many offshoots and benefits into wildly varied fields but as some embarrassing reductio ad absurdum lever usually in the form of "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we (insert mundane goal here) and whatever did happen to Tang?" :P

I suppose it is impossible to extrapolate but I'm betting the odds are we wouldn't even be having this discussion as we are, lacking the technology, had not the moon landing been undertaken. I also can't help but wonder what the world would look like if say Wilbur had been very convincing in arguing that glorified kites were eating up the proceeds from the bicycle shop.

I'm glad that private enterprise is now somewhat involved but I'm frustrated and angry that we dropped the ball after Apollo 17 because to me it reveals a misguided set of priorities and a lack of education and understanding of the value of research and exploration.

On a positive note I sincerely hope SpaceX recovers quickly and continues to strive for lofty goals. I really dislike being pushed into sounding like Alan Rickman doing Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe.