Why NASA Is Helping SpaceX in the Red Dragon Mission to Mars

Why NASA Is Helping SpaceX in the Red Dragon Mission to Mars

The SpaceX Red Dragon mission is something to behold. Elon Musk and his squad plan to send an uncrewed-but-badder version of the Dragon to Mars in 2018, and land it on the surface of the planet using a new technology called supersonic retropropulsion.

inverse.com

I recently posted a news article on the new tech SpaceX will be using, and I found this great follow up.

And that’s critical when you realize what NASA gets in return for this partnership: access to data about Red Dragon’s launch, entry, descent, and landing — especially when it comes to the supersonic retropropulsion technology. These are things “wouldn’t be available to us in any other means,” said McAlister.

And NASA needs this data. Any Mars mission the agency greenlights needs to basically have a 100 percent certainty for success — that’s just the way government institutions have to operate. Moving forward for a 2040 deadline to send humans to the planet, NASA will need to use these numbers to plan their own missions out. And they’re getting this information “a decade sooner and at a small fraction of the cost,” said McAlister.

With the strict guidelines for NASA to always succeed, it actually makes a lot of sense to collaborate with SpaceX. SpaceX being a private company doesn’t have these restrictions and have greater freedom to experiment with new technologies despite not guaranteeing success. Being at the mercy of the political system, NASA could face budget cuts from those less informed in congress if they were testing such a technology and crashed a rover on Mars. It’s very cool that we’re at the stage where NASA is able to collaborate with private companies pushing both NASA and private space companies forward.