Well…sitting here waiting for the Fedex guy to come and thought I’d do a little comment on an article I read this morning by Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy. There was a little noticed announcement last week by Elon Musk and Space X that they are going to try to land one of their Dragon V2 capsules on Mars by 2018…yep…when everyone else says they can’t get there until 2025 at the earliest, Space X is going to try it in two years…unmanned, of course, since the Falcon Heavy that they are going to use to launch it has not been tested yet and the Dragon V2 has not been flown either…but, I find it just so cool that private industry is going to do what NASA can’t…and beat them to Mars by 7 years. I know there have been many successful Mars probes sent by NASA and I applaud their work…work that continues to amaze me…but, to fly the hardware that is going to be used to send people to Mars in that short a time frame goes up the scale to really cool. Oh, and one more thing with the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9’s strapped together….when they test launch the Heavy later in the year, Space X is going to try to land all three boosters; two on land and one on the autonomous barge where they landed the last Falcon 9….that is going to be so cool and I had hoped they would try something like that…Space X is putting excitement back into space and even this old guy is pretty geeked….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well…sitting here waiting for the Fedex guy to come and thought I’d do a little comment on an article I read this morning by Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy. There was a little noticed announcement last week by Elon Musk and Space X that they are going to try to land one of their … Continue reading Red Dragon on Mars….<\/span>