How SpaceX Will Land On Mars

The SpaceX spacecraft is currently humanity's best hope of setting foot on the planet Mars in its lifetime. The feature that makes the spacecraft so well suited for this job is, of course, its incredible power. There's no doubt that a future spacecraft

will

have more than enough strength to send crews and massive amounts of supplies on their way to Mars is one thing, but what about getting back down to the Martian surface? We are talking about the most complicated maneuver of the entire trip, the decisive moment and there is much more. involved in solving it than you think, this is how the SpaceX spacecraft

will

land

on Mars.

Let's establish right now that not all of us are space scientists or physicists. I'm definitely not any of those things, but fortunately we don't need to be geniuses to understand the basic principles behind interplanetary travel, so we're going to keep all of this at a very accessible level. Before we can talk about

land

ing on Mars, we need to know how the Starship got there, which we always need to remember. about space travel is that everything is always in motion and within the context of a solar system everything moves in an orbit around the sun, we are currently held in the sun's gravity well and the only thing stopping us from falling deeper. is the orbital speed of the Earth, which is approximately 30 km/s, that's how fast we are traveling right now in a great circle around a star that takes 365 days to complete.

Mars is further from the Sun than Earth, meaning it is as far down the gravity well as we are, and therefore Mars can travel at a slower orbital speed without falling, which is why Mars orbits the Sun. Sun at around 24 km/s now if we want to leave Earth in a spaceship and explore the planets. We will become just another object spinning in the gravity well of the Sun and like the planet Earth, if we reduce our orbital speed we would begin to fall into that gravity well, this will change our orbit in the direction of an interior. planet like Venus and by the same mechanics, if our spaceship starts moving faster than planet Earth, we will raise gravity and take our orbit towards an outer planet like Mars, so traveling through the solar system is about changing its speed in relation to its start.

Point out that the technical term we use to describe this is Delta V, where Delta means change and V means speed, we normally measure Delta V in km/s, so if the Earth is moving at 30 km/s and you accelerate your spacecraft 31 km. /s you have a Delta V of 1 to the same extent if you decelerate your spacecraft with respect to the Earth and travel at 29 km/s you also have a Delta V of one and, however, if you take off from the Earth's surface at At 1 km/s you are not going to start ascending through the solar system, you are not going to rise above the surface of the Earth because gravity and atmospheric drag keep you down.

These natural forces will affect the amount of Delta V needed to maneuver. spacecraft that is why it is so difficult to get from the surface of the Earth to outer space the Delta V required to reach a typical low Earth orbit will be around 9.4 km/s that is a lot of acceleration and that is why that our spacecraft requires The enormous power of the super heavy booster at launch is also the reason why Starship needs to stop for a recharging session in Earth orbit before we can continue towards Mars because we are going to need a lot more Delta V to complete this trip in To change speed we need propulsion and propulsion needs fuel.

The advantage of filling in orbit is that it resets our starting point. From here we only need another 9.5 km/s of Delta to V to reach the surface of Mars, so it's basically the same as the change required just to escape Earth's atmosphere, but there will be a big difference in the approach we take to the next stage of the journey because, while escaping Earth was all about speeding up, landing on Mars will require a lot of deceleration. down and this can be just as difficult to achieve. You imagine a fully powered spacecraft in low Earth orbit has enough thrust for 6-7 km/s of Delta V, this is obviously a little less than the 9.5 km/s needed to get to Mars, but that's okay because the same forces that made it so difficult to escape Earth's atmosphere, gravity and aerodynamic drag, will work in our favor when we come to land, effectively increasing our starship's Delta V potential, so here's how it goes for Go down, okay, we are in orbit around the Earth, but even a few hundred kilometers above the surface we are still firmly trapped in the Earth's gravity, the only thing keeping us up right now is speed, if the starship slowed down.

It would begin to fall towards Earth for the same reasoning. If we do the opposite and accelerate, we will continue to rise into space because we are still so close to Earth that we need a lot of Delta V to fight gravity. The ship will have to accelerate 2.44 km/s just to reach the height of the geostationary orbit, another 0.68 will take us to the height of the Moon. Here we are finally at the edge of Earth's gravity. Well, the force of gravity is infinite but the power. The attraction dissipates relatively quickly as you move away. Now all we need is another 0.9 km/s of speed to completely escape the Earth's influence.

From this point floating in the vacuum of space far beyond the Moon, we only need 039 m/s of Delta. V to achieve the transfer speed from our Earth to Mars, this second leg of the journey has consumed 3.6 km/s of Delta V, which is at least half the potential energy of our Starship, if not more, and that It means we don't have enough fuel. We are left to successfully land on Mars only with engines and here comes the problem that we need to solve all the speed we acquire to escape the Earth's atmosphere and gravity has made us travel around the Sun at a speed significantly higher than the To begin with, the planet Mars was already traveling at 30 km/s, on the other hand, it is orbiting at a speed of only 24 km/s, so we are moving significantly faster than our target planet , which means we are going to overtake the planet.

Mars and end up stuck somewhere in the asteroid belt unless we start slowing down after several months of cruising through the vacuum of space, we need to execute our first deceleration after turning the spacecraft around and getting the Raptor engines back on. to accelerate. Reduce speed by 0.67 km/s to be captured in the Mars gravity well. This is the first step in what is about to become a very difficult journey. If we burn another 0.34 km/s of speed we will reach the height of the outer Moon giving 0.4 km/s of additional Delta V takes us to the inner Moon Phobos, this is where things get really complicated by decreasing so much speed, we have already expended more than 5 km/s of potential Delta V in our fuel tanks. and that leaves us between 1 and two remaining, but we need at least another 4 and 1/2 km/second of Delta V to safely reach the surface, in theory this is still possible as long as we are very strategic about how we use our last bit of fuel and it is important to remember that everything from now on is purely speculative.

This is our interpretation of the most logistically feasible Mars landing. If we want to conserve as much fuel as possible for our landing, then we must take advantage of it. of some external forces to slow our ship to a reasonable speed, descending into a low circular orbit of Mars would consume most of the remaining fuel, so we probably shouldn't do that, in this case it would be better to insert the ship into an elliptical orbit, so instead of flying in a circle we move in an oval pattern with a low point or pary near the planet and a high point or apy deeper into space.

By using this maneuver, we can begin to take advantage of both. Mars' aerodynamic drag and gravity to help us slow down Mars' atmosphere are still very thin, but we'll take any help we can get. We can lower the Pair from our orbit to the point where the spacecraft actually plunges into Mars' upper atmosphere. On the planet, by doing this very carefully, we can catch some atmospheric drag and lose a small amount of speed before being thrown back to our apigy, where if we've done this correctly, Mars's gravity will pull us in to repeat the process. The process repeats itself every time we dive into the atmosphere, gaining a little more of that precious Delta V, bringing us closer to the speed we need for a soft landing on the planet's surface, but we can't maintain this maneuver indefinitely.

Eventually we need to go from a shallow dive to a full dive through the Martian atmosphere, it's actually quite difficult to achieve a landing trajectory for Mars because the planet is only about half the size of Earth, which means the Angle of attack needed to get down. The sky is quite steep, this means you need a lot of energy to push the vehicle down to prevent it from jumping and shooting back into space. We want to save our engines until the last possible moment to be able to push the ship. The depths of the atmosphere must come from somewhere else.

This is why SpaceX's original design for an interplanetary transportation system in 2016 had an aerodynamic lifting body on the upper stage. The spaceship is much smaller than yours, so it doesn't need as much downforce. but the methodology remains more or less the same in its Final Approach. The spacecraft will actually turn around and enter the atmosphere upside down, so that with the belly and tail pointing up and the nose pointing down, in this way the lift generated by the body is We will push the vehicle forward. the surface at a steeper angle to achieve entry. We will also begin to lose a lot of speed thanks to aerodynamic resistance.

Once the angle of attack is established, the Starship will turn toward the more traditional belly. The drop maneuver we've seen on Earth is about creating the maximum amount of drag physically possible and slowing you down, but this force can only do so much. The maximum speed of a free fall is something we call terminal velocity. Imagine that you jump into a bottomless hole, your body will accelerate as you fall to a certain point where the resistance and buoyancy of your body become equal to the force of gravity and your speed becomes constant. One way to cheat terminal velocity is by using a parachute.

This greatly increases drag and reduces our terminal velocity. Starship is not going to use parachutes, so there will come a point where the aerodynamic drag of the vehicle will have done all it is going to do and we will reach terminal velocity due to the thinner atmosphere. Terminal velocity on Mars is about five times faster than on Earth; In other words, that means only 1/5 of the Delta V is achieved by circling in the air on Mars compared to what we've already seen Starship do on Earth, which means more engine power will be needed to landing on Mars than on Earth, which is why fuel is such a major concern here, assuming everything up to this point has gone correctly, the spacecraft's engines will fire one last time and turn tail toward the surface, at which point that the fuel in the rocket header tanks will provide enough Delta V to perfectly synchronize our ship with the surface of Mars and we land softly, now there are many things that have to go right and there are zero. margin of error, you either get a 100% score on the exam or you die, so knowing all that we can appreciate that landing on Mars is going to be incredibly difficult in a huge vehicle like Starship, it's much easier for NASA to land more small and light. vehicles on Mars because the potential Delta V of their fuel is determined by the mass of the vehicle and the efficiency of the engine, so one pound of fuel achieves more changes in speed for a lighter spacecraft than for a heavier spacecraft and there are a limit on the amount of fuel we can take to Mars Starship would be much easier to land on Mars if it were lighter but SpaceX needs it to be so gigantic to achieve the goal that Elon Musk has set for himself, which is to build a self-sufficient ship. city ​​of 1 million people on Mars SpaceX is working hard to boost the Starship's Delta V.

They want to make the Starship V2 longer with larger fuel tanks while also making it lighter and adding three more Raptor vacuum engines, the third version of The Raptor is currently in design and will likely offer greaterefficiency and therefore more potential of Delta V. Now there are other longer-term solutions as well. Remember that the outer moon of Mars dios, the Delta V needed to go from low earth orbit to dios orbit is only about 5.3 km/second, that's much more manageable and imagine if you could build an outpost or a gateway to Mars in orbit we now have the potential to refuel so the craft can make the most difficult part of the journey with more than enough Delta V to save this gives it a margin of error that would increase the safety of a landing on Mars by orders of magnitude, so yes, landing a fully loaded spacecraft on Mars will be logistically crazy, this is one of those situations where SpaceX won.

I don't know anything for sure until they try. We've seen this twice just by launching the Starship and both times it exploded in mid-air. Learning how to land on Mars is likely to be a similar matter. They are much more likely to fail. before they succeed, they could fail several times, it will take a spectacular amount of willpower to make this work and not give up and probably more than many people are genuinely prepared for and then eventually we will try to do this with people on board. And calling this ambitious seems like an incredible understatement, but throughout human history we have achieved the Impossible many times, so what is it?

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