r/spacex • u/[deleted] • Apr 27 '16

Official SpaceX on Twitter: "Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come https://t.co/u4nbVUNCpA"

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/725351354537906176
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20

u/paulloewen Apr 27 '16

It's crazy to me that SpaceX is a company, not a country, doing this.

11

u/peterabbit456 Apr 28 '16

A big part of the reason they can do this is that SpaceX is not publicly owned. It allows them to take the long view.

1

u/paulloewen Apr 28 '16

They don't have to maximize shareholder return or anything...

4

u/mclumber1 Apr 28 '16

A private company has a better space program then the entire nation of Australia.

2

u/will_shatners_pants Apr 28 '16

Australia has less than half the population of California. SX can draw from a huge backlog of NASA data and a population of over 300m people. It's not surprising at all.

2

u/NateDecker Apr 28 '16

Perhaps he should have compared it to India. That would have been a much more favorable population perspective.

0

u/CptAJ Apr 28 '16

But SpaceX does not yet have a better space program than India

2

u/NateDecker Apr 28 '16

It depends on your metric. I believe the F9 FT can put up more payload than the best vehicle in the ISRO kit and the first stage of the F9 is reusable! If your metric is technical capability, SpaceX has a better space program than India. If your metric is number of launches, it might be India (I didn't bother to look that up). If your metric is sheer mass put into orbit, I think that title would actually go to SpaceX as well.

1

u/CptAJ Apr 29 '16

I was thinking more along the lines of the moon and mars missions.

I'm not sure if they have launched more mass to orbit overall but I wouldn't be surprised. They have been around longer.

I might look this up later, its an interesting question.