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)

[ugordan]

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 replace the heat shield with a Viking-class conic shield (physics and success of the design dictate using what works);

Why? What's to say that's the only design that works? Even circumlunar flight reentries were proven out by different capsule shapes, both Apollo and Zond (which Dragon is more similar to).

I don't think either replacing the hatch or modifying the pressurized hull structure would work. You're approaching a lander development program and not reusing the Dragon design so the whole point gets lost. That becomes a Dragon only by name, besides what's the point in reducing the mass if Falcon Heavy can launch more mass to Mars than any useful scientific payload you can put inside Red Dragon?

[MarsInMyLifetime]

...You're approaching a lander development program and not reusing the Dragon design so the whole point gets lost. That becomes a Dragon only by name, besides what's the point in reducing the mass if Falcon Heavy can launch more mass to Mars than any useful scientific payload you can put inside Red Dragon?

Granted, but once that mass gets to the vicinity of Mars, the devil is in getting it to the surface successfully. These were just changes I needed to envision for the EDL preliminaries in order to make the game work for me. I'm on the surface now, somehow, and in the payload mode. I'll still stick with the IRSU demonstration packages for initial payloads--methane generation first, then water purification. I'd still put station-keeping science (mastcam, weather sensors, and comms) on the top in place of the docking adapter.