Re:NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s co...
by Veedrac on Sunday June 25, 2023 @07:18AM
(#36467033)
NASA was broadly happy with technical feasibility for Red Dragon, which pretty much just repurposed Dragon 2's biprop abort motors to land >1 ton on Mars for their estimate of $150-190m/launch. They didn't go forward with it, but this was early 2010s so that's not much surprise.
With infinite mass in Mars orbit, you'd presumably want to scale up, but while this marginally hurts aerobraking performance, you have vastly more mass margin to just bring a bit more propellant.
If course, you'd probably still want to land something in scope of what you can launch from Earth dry in one flight, but for sure we're still talking >5 tons there, probably more like 10.
With infinite mass in Mars orbit, you'd presumably want to scale up, but while this marginally hurts aerobraking performance, you have vastly more mass margin to just bring a bit more propellant.
If course, you'd probably still want to land something in scope of what you can launch from Earth dry in one flight, but for sure we're still talking >5 tons there, probably more like 10.