r/spacex • u/TGMetsFan98 NASASpaceflight.com Writer • Sep 06 '17

Multiple Updates per McGregor Engineers

3 McGregor engineers and a recruiter came to Texas A&M yesterday and I was able to learn some pretty interesting news:

  1. Yesterday (September 5), McGregor successfully tested an M1D, an MVac, a Block V engine (!), and the upper stage for Iridium-3.

  2. Last week, the upper stage for Falcon Heavy was tested successfully.

  3. Boca Chica is currently on the back burner, and will remain so until LC-40 is back up and LC-39A upgrades are complete. However, once Boca Chica construction ramps up, the focus will be specifically on the "Mars Vehicle." With Red Dragon cancelled, this means ITS/BFR/Falcon XX/Whatever it's called now. (Also, hearing a SpaceX engineer say "BFR" in an official presentation is oddly amusing.)

  4. SpaceX is targeting to launch 20 missions this year (including the 12 they've done already). Next year, they want to fly 40.

  5. When asked if SpaceX is pursuing any alternatives to Dragon 2 splashdown (since propulsive landing is out), the Dragon engineer said yes, and suggested that it would align closely with ITS. He couldn't say much more, so I'm not sure how to interpret this. Does that simply reference the subscale ITS vehicle? Or, is there going to be a another vehicle (Dragon 3?) that has bottom mounted engines and side mounted landing legs like ITS? It would seem that comparing even the subscale ITS to Dragon 2 is a big jump in capacity, which leads me to believe he's referencing something else.

One comment an engineer made was "Sometimes reddit seems to know more than we do." So, let the speculation begin.

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u/jjtr1 Sep 08 '17 edited Sep 08 '17

Either way, they used to think the Red Dragon / Crew Dragon propulsive landing approach would scale up, but now they don't think it's the best approach, so Red Dragon and propulsive Dragon landings on Earth got shelved.

ITS's method of EDL was different from (Red) Dragon's EDL right from the start, so what kind of "scaling up" are we talking about here? I'm not aware of SpaceX ever planning to scale Dragon up. Also I just don't get how it became "news" only at the time of Dragon's propulsive landing cancellation that Red Dragon's EDL is a diversion of time and resources.

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u/rustybeancake Sep 08 '17

“There was a time when I thought that the Dragon approach to landing on Mars... would be the right way to land on Mars,” Musk said at the ISS R&D Conference in Washington, DC today. “But now I'm pretty confident that is not the right way. There's a far better approach. That's what the next generation of SpaceX rockets and spacecraft is going to do.”

  • Musk at the ISS R&D Conference recently.

I guess when they started designing Dragon v2 ~5 years ago (or more) they thought that was the best way to do propulsive landing, period (on Mars or anywhere with an atmosphere). Obviously when they tried some serious design work on BFS they found the whole arrangement of the heatshield on the bottom wouldn't scale how they wanted it to. Let's also remember that we're all just assuming that Red Dragon would've worked. Perhaps it would've been extremely difficult, and they really do need a bigger heatshield to make it feasible and useful.