SpaceX plans to send a ship to Mars in 2018

Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come pic.twitter.com/u4nbVUNCpA- SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2016
 Today, the company SpaceX announced exciting news: the ship will be sent to Mars in 2018. As you can understand, we are talking about initially unmanned, automatic expedition. The ship will be sent to the carrier rocket Falcon Heavy, is a larger version of the Falcon 9. The ship landed on Mars, and the experts of the company will receive information on the landing, which will allow to draw conclusions about the delivery of goods to Mars.

If all fails, then SpaceX will become the first private company, whose spacecraft sat on the surface of another planet. As for the spacecraft, which will go to Mars, it will be a Red Dragon - a modified version of transport, delivering cargo to the ISS. Red Dragon is equipped with eight motors SuperDraco, which are powerful enough to put the capsule on Mars. planting principle basically resembles a technology that is used to return the first SpaceX Falcon9 stage to earth.

This fit enables you to deliver a fairly large amount of the payload on the planet. So far, the heaviest object lowered to Mars, the rover Curiosity was weighing nearly 1 ton.

Wikipedia tells us that March 2014 it was reported that the concept of Red Dragon can be used by NASA as a cheaper way to accomplish the mission Mars Sample Return delivery of samples of Martian soil to Earth. According to preliminary calculations, Red Dragon will be able to make a soft landing on the surface of Mars with about 2 tons of payload. This is more than 2 times higher than the current record set by NASA «Heavenly crane" that lowered Curiosity rover weighing 899 kg on the surface of the red planet in August 2012. Large volume and mass of the payload will allow to execute the transfer of the samples collected on the Earth's orbit (the original script Mars Sample Return involves the transmission of samples on the Martian orbit), which will reduce the potential risks and costs of the mission.

Do you think there will be able to mask his plan? Yes, of course, it all fails I do not know, but I hope it do you mean, 2018? It does not, the person is not ready to implement something similar today voted 324 people. Abstain 50. Only registered users can participate in the survey. Come in, please.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/275010/