A proposal to land a probe on the Martian surface on board a SpaceX Dragon capsule has been proposed by NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay. The mission, dubbed "Red Dragon," may be ready for launch by 2018.
The Red Dragon proposal will be made as part of the next round of Discovery missions, NASA robotic probes designed to come in the range of $400 million. If approved, Red Dragon would carry a variety of instruments, including a drill that would penetrate the Martian surface about one meter or so underground to try to locate and sample subsurface ice. If Mars has microbial life, it is thought that it might lurk in these layers of ice underground.
Two landing sites are being considered for Red Dragon, each of which has already been visited by a NASA probe. One is the landing site of the Mars Phoenix in the Vastitas Borealis region. The other is the landing site of the Viking 2 at Utopia Planitia. Both sites are thought to have sub surface water.
SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk has been touting versions of the Dragon spacecraft, which is being developed under a NASA program to be a space taxi for the International Space Station, for planetary missions. SpaceX is also developing a version of its Falcon launch vehicle, known as the Falcon Heavy, that could boost massive space probes, built around versions of the Dragon, to various destinations of the Solar System. The Dragon would be outfitted with retro rockets and, for the Red Dragon Mission, perhaps parachutes to soft land on the surfaces of other worlds. The Mars mission would be the first test of using the Dragon as a lander.
Using the Dragon as a common template for both a command module style space craft and a landing module is an interesting approach. If the technical challenges of outfitted a space craft designed to take astronauts to and from low Earth orbit for landing missions can be overcome relatively easily, a new approach in space exploration could result, making it cheaper and more reliable.
One of the arguments against going back to the Moon is that building a landing module would add to the cost of such a mission over, say, a voyage to an asteroid. But if SpaceX can create a landing module version of the Dragon and if it could be outfitted to take human beings instead of a robotic probe, Musk's company could well have enabled a return to the Moon for far less cost than its detractors in the Obama administration have suggested. A "Lunar Dragon" could be combined with an Orion MPCV to return to the Moon, perhaps in time, as Rep. Bill Posey, R-Florida has proposed, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the Moon.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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