Red Dragon Options

[Paolo]

'Red Dragon' Mission Mulled as Cheap Search for Mars Life
any opinion on this? would it really make sense adapting a manned spaceship to unmanned Mars landing? I am skeptical...

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[MarsInMyLifetime]

I'm new to UMSF, but a long-time advocate of robotic missions. The premise of this thread is not unlike the problem handed down to American engineers and scientists right after WWII: "Folks, we have a bunch of V-2s here. What kind of science can you do with something made for an entirely different use?" First steps were crude, but the variety of science eventually done was outstanding--for a war missile.

I'd modify some things in the uncrewed version of Dragon to make it more Mars-mission worthy: replace the heat shield with a Viking-class conic shield (physics and success of the design dictate using what works); cut away the heat shield for landing--no need to soft land that mass; remove the Earth-style parachutes from the lower bays and instead have an MSL-class parachute system in a new nose bay filling the formerly empty nose cone volume; remove the vestigial forward hatch and ISS docking system and use the space to store and unfold 6 round solar arrays for power akin to those on Beagle (the central platform would hold antennae and instruments like mastcams and lidar); replace the pressure vessel sides with ribs to reduce some weight without compromising the aeroshell; use the landing leg tubes to guide sampling drills on telescoping shafts to the surface; with the heat shield gone, open a trap door hinged on one side as a ramp to the surface for mobile exploration tools (moles, Pathfinder-class bots, or even tumbleweeds if you must); utilize the deployed sensor bay as a weather station and lower-level camera platform. And the remaining space (of which there is still plenty in that huge hull) could be for what I think is the most valuable primary payload: testing the various IRSU technologies for water and fuel production out of the atmosphere.

I recall, though, that the V-2 was replaced by cheaper, more efficient sounding rockets for all the science roles that it pioneered, and I suspect this modified Dragon, even if gifted on the science community, might quickly go the same route!
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Don (MarsInMyLifetime)