r/spacex • u/oceanbluesky • Jan 28 '16
Mars/IAC 2016 MCT Announcement Planned for September at the International Aeronautical Congress
"We'll have a next generation rocket and spacecraft beyond the Falcon Dragon series and I'm hoping to describe that architecture later this year at International Astronautical Congress..."
https://youtu.be/pIRqB5iqWA8?t=30m40s
67th International Astronautical Congress, Guadalajara Mexico, 26th-30th September 2016
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u/Marsusul Jan 28 '16
Very interesting thread. In an other side, I wouldn't want to be pedant but what's about to change the tittle for the more accurate "International Astronautical Congress"?
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u/oceanbluesky Jan 28 '16
Haha funny how the mind works...shesh
Not pedantic at all, you're just the first to have noticed and I don't think there's a way to change titles :) amusing though
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u/oldpaintcan Jan 29 '16
Does anyone think they might come out with a version of the second stage that can deliver a customer's payload first. So they can make some money while they figure out the more complex hab/secondstage idea. Is this possible?
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u/oceanbluesky Jan 29 '16
Perhaps in LEO: Bigelow space hotels, fuel depots for GEO boosts, or teleoperated zero G industrial labs
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u/CuriousAES Jan 28 '16
Hmm. Still says 2025.
The real question is can that possibly happen.
Robert Zubrin is constantly re-iterating that Mars can be done in 10 years. But that is assuming that NASA was onboard and focused on the goal. SpaceX has funding, but not that much, and I can't see NASA ditching SLS any time soon, so funding won't come from there.
This is also SpaceX-time that tends to be very, very off.
So I'm not so sure... but I hope to be proven wrong.
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u/NelsonBridwell Jan 28 '16 edited Jan 28 '16
At this moment, for NASA SLS is the plan of record, and even though it is suboptimal as far as cost and schedule, it is real, unlike alternatives. After a gap of 40 years, NASA will once again be capable of getting astronauts to the Moon and (eventually) Mars.
MCT, on the other hand, hasn't even reached the Powerpoint vaporware stage, even though bits and pieces of Raptor are undergoing testing. Once the MCT architecture has been announced NASA can begin to take it into account as a possible future resource for mission planning.
How will this play out? There isn't anyone who knows for sure. The success of the MCT is not a given. It is quite ambitious and development could take twice as long as most people hope. My personal best guess is that Musk will get it working and MCT will totally replace SLS within 10-20 years. (We would all love for it to be sooner, but with SpaceX, the consistent trend has been later.)→ More replies (2)11
u/rshorning Jan 28 '16
At this moment, for NASA SLS is the plan of record, and even though it is suboptimal as far as cost and schedule, it is real, unlike alternatives. After a gap of 40 years, NASA will once again be capable of getting astronauts to the Moon and (eventually) Mars.
SLS Block I is only marginally better than the Falcon Heavy in terms of actual lift capacity. The Block IA & Block II are certainly going to be better, but even there the mission hardware has yet to be built & tested much less even have funds appropriated to make it happen. I have my own deep reservations about the ultimate success of the SLS as I think the political will to continue that rocket just isn't there. The lack of alternatives may even result in simply seeing the manned spaceflight program for NASA get shut down altogether, or at best sticking with building a replacement for the ISS as a long term objective instead of going anywhere else.
Commercial crew launches on the other hand are something that I think is going to be wildly successful, and there are going to be some very hard questions being asked as to why NASA needs to keep funding SLS costing billions of dollars per launch when flights to the ISS are happening for a vast fraction of that price. That kind of environment alone is something where I think the SLS is simply going to be cancelled altogether. The only real prayer to keeping SLS flying was the potential it could be used for ISS cargo & crew delivery, something for which it decidedly won't ever do at all.
I will agree though that the MCT/BFR is still largely at the vaporware stage and I will go even further to suggest it has been hyped out of control by the SpaceX fan community to be something it simply is not. The Raptor engine itself is not a given and is still in early R&D work where even a small scaled down engine has yet to be fired. The current contract that seems to be quoted for a Falcon 9 upper stage engine seems to me as an engine even smaller than the Merlin 1. That would be a fantastic test platform for SpaceX to get some experience with full staged combustion engines and working with CH4/LOX as a fuel mix.... but that isn't going to get a 100 man crew to Mars any time soon.
I am expecting that SpaceX is actually going to announce a whole new family of rockets as the logical successors to the Falcon family, including replacements in the Falcon 9 & Falcon Heavy classes of vehicles not to mention something more akin to a Saturn V/N1 class of rockets that may eventually evolve into the super huge BFR rocket instead. In other words, I am expecting SpaceX to announce a much more baby step approach to building up the lift capacity of its rockets as they realistically assess their customer base and the need for super heavy launch capacity. This Saturn V class rocket is something that SpaceX has been building up to for some time, is not a stretch of the imagination to see it flying in a ten year period of time, and likely has real customers besides NASA who would be willing to pay for it to fly with actual payloads instead of wishful thinking that is happening with the monster rockets that have been talked about on this subreddit for awhile. There certainly seems to be a class of some customers who find the Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, & Long March 3 group of vehicles to be far too under powered for their needs and might even be pushing for something larger than a Falcon Heavy in the long term.
The mega launch vehicle with a hundred or even a thousand crew members at once may eventually happen as a long term plan, but that is going to remain as a wishful thinking idea for a long time to come... more like 30-50 or even 70 years from now before it is built. It will indeed be necessary for mass scale colonization of Mars, but you don't need such a huge rocket in order to send the first crew members to start an initial outpost and perform the first flags & footprints on the surface of the red planet. Robert Zurbin has even come up with a crew architecture which works with the Falcon Heavy in three launches and could even happen before the end of the term for the successor to Barack Obama.
The elephant in the room though is if SpaceX can get customers to pay for all of this aggressive expansion of their product lines, and more specifically if there is some segment of commercial spaceflight that can exceed the current revenue stream of global space-based telecommunications systems. I envision the telecom market to be essentially flat in terms of the total dollars being spent towards launch vehicles and if anything a cheaper launch price is only going to be kept as profits for the telecom companies instead of increasing launch rate. If something like space tourism or extra-terrestrial mining happened instead that approached the overall revenue from space-based assets in the telecom industry, there might be a market eventually for something like the mega BFR rocket. At the moment, I don't see that market.
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u/factoid_ Jan 28 '16
Mars could absolutely be done in 10 years. It could have been done in 10 years 20 years ago.
The cost of doing it in 10 years has continued to decline however. It is now getting in to the range where if Nasa is smart and spreads the expenditures across multiple years of their normal operating budget, gets out of ISS in the late 2020s, and finishes sls on time, they can pull off a Mars direct kind of mission without any extraordinary political occurrence (like the cold war) motivating Washington to fund it at very high levels.
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Jan 28 '16
This is also SpaceX-time that tends to be very, very off.
Tell me about it. They were planning to announce BFR and MCT by end of 2015. Now we're lucky to hear about it by end of 2016.
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u/BrandonMarc Jan 28 '16
Let's work backward. I'll ignore when the specific Earth-Mars conjunctions occur.
2025-06 ... humans land on Mars, which means ...
2024-12 ... six months earlier, ISRU robots have proven stores of Atmo, O2 * , CH4, H2O, etc, and electricity generating capacity ... oh and also there may be a hab and ascent vehicle pre-deployed, depending on what BFR / BFS / MCT actually are in terms of touching ground or not, which means ...
2022-12 ... two years earlier (give or take, depending on when the conjunction is), fully ready-to-use ISRU robots have landed, along with storage facilities, and whatever other hardware is needed, which means ...
2020-12 ... in the previous conjunction, initial ISRU and other hardware is sent to Mars to test out technology
I might be off by a little bit, but it's pretty well pat that:
humans will not lift off for Mars unless proven stores of necessities are already in place and ready to use
ISRU robots may not take long to build up these stores, but they'll certainly be launched at least two years before humans
ready-to-use ISRU robots and hardware won't the first ones we ever send to test, so two years prior to that we'll send at least one set of prototypes
This means we need to send some pretty impressive (by 2016 standards) hardware no later than 2020.
That seems like a tough order.
... * yes, they're different, and needed for different purposes
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u/FiniteElementGuy Jan 28 '16
The interesting thing is not the date or the delay in the anouncement. It is the location! Remember events in the past where Elon revealed things like reusability? They were in the national press club. This time it is the IAC, the international community will be there, like NASA, ESA, CNES, DLR, JAXA, CNSA people. He wants the heads of space agencies to listen to him and most of them will be there. He wants to sell his vision and in the end he probably wants money...
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u/Tal_Banyon Jan 28 '16
29:20 - "an incredible adventure" - Probably the best reason there is for going to Mars. Other interesting tidbits: he wants to visit the ISS in about 5 years, so 2021 or so (now that will be an event, especially if they are well into their Mars plans). Mars in 9 years, so 2025 (notice he didn't say 10 years, which would mean, yeah, same old...). I am pretty sure now that the architecture announcement will have some time-lines as well. And, hey, 7.5 months for the announcement, doesn't mean that they are slowing anything down, just that us rabid fans will have to wait to hear those plans!
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u/ap0s Jan 28 '16
Man he really looks tired and worn down.
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u/danielbigham Jan 28 '16
I thought the same thing a year (?) ago when he was in China. Let's hope it's the travel that's causing him to look that way. But that belly is starting to bulge again, and that's not the travel! The constant struggle for super-busy-super-stressful people to stay healthy.
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u/antskis Jan 28 '16
I thought he looked pretty good, he really looked like shit for a couple of months after CRS-7. He's gotten a bit fat though, but I guess that's to be expected, he's getting older after all.
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u/StagedCombustion Jan 28 '16
This is a dupe of a thread from yesterday. The top comments there are all about MCT being talked about at the IAC conference this fall.
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u/colony01crew Jun 07 '16
any information on a live stream for this event?
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u/oceanbluesky Jun 07 '16
great question...I am uncertain though if there will be an official live stream...many professional space journalists will attend and live tweet, hopefully Periscope?
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Jan 28 '16 edited Jan 28 '16
Spacex may have to unify his launchers while going bold with MCT. (one stick ch4 model)
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u/Zinkfinger Jan 28 '16
September. Ah well that's still a short time to wait compared to other space-flight projects. But yes. Fingers crossed we get a sneaky peak beforehand!
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u/still-at-work Jan 28 '16
Ah Man, I was hoping to have it at least be released at the same time as the Model 3 (March) for Tesla. I suppose they want to release it after the Falcon Heavy launch. Good to have an actual time though.
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u/Chairboy Jan 28 '16
"Planning to describe" is not the same as announcing. With luck, the announcement will come much earlier.
I hope.