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SPACE TECHNOLOGY


founder Elon Musk’s personal Tesla might have got all the headlines during SpaceX’s historic rocket launch last week, but his long-term vision for the company is much more ambitious. It is the development of technology and resources suitable for human colonisation on Mars. Musk has expressed his interest in travelling to the Red Planet, stating: “I’d like to die on Mars, and not just on impact.” Meanwhile, the successful first launch of SpaceX’s Falcon


Sending cars to T


he surreal image of a Tesla car and its “Starman” passenger being blasted towards the Red Planet from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, was a great way of bringing space to the masses. Billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX


Heavy will not only usher in a new era of space exploration – it could open the door to a world of possibilities for improving life back on Earth. Musk has stated that one of his goals is to improve the cost and reliability of access to space, ultimately by a factor of ten. A major goal of SpaceX has been to develop a rapidly reusable launch system. A rocket every two years or so could provide a base for the


people arriving in 2025 after a launch in 2024. According to early Tesla and SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson, Musk believes that by 2035 at the latest, there will be thousands of rockets flying a million people to Mars, in order to enable a self-sustaining human colony.


ABOUT SPACEX Space Exploration Technologies, doing business as SpaceX, is a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX has since developed the Falcon launch vehicle family and the Dragon spacecraft family, which both currently deliver payloads into Earth orbit. SpaceX has flown 10 missions to the International Space Station (ISS) under a cargo resupply contract. NASA also awarded SpaceX a further development contract in 2011 to develop and demonstrate a human-rated Dragon, which would be used to transport astronauts to the ISS and return them safely to Earth. In September 2016, Musk unveiled the mission architecture


of the Interplanetary Transport System programme, an ambitious privately-funded initiative to develop spaceflight technology for use in manned interplanetary spaceflight. If demand emerges, this transport architecture could lead to sustainable human settlements on Mars in the long term. SpaceX currently manufactures two broad classes of rocket


engine in-house: the kerosene fuelled Merlin engines and the hypergolic fuelled Draco/SuperDraco vernier thrusters. The upgraded Falcon 9 rocket is currently the only space launch system that uses densified propellants. SpaceX successfully re-introduced this technology with an earlier programme. Before, propellant densification had been used only on some ICBMs, which are no longer in service, and the (unsuccessful) Soviet lunar rocket N1. SpaceX utilises a high degree of vertical integration in the


10 /// Environmental Engineering /// March 2018


Andy Pye looks at some of the plans of SpaceX and some things you may have missed. Ambitious? But then, did you ever expect a Tesla Roadster would be orbiting the Sun in 2018?


production of its rockets and rocket engines. SpaceX builds its rocket engines, rocket stages, spacecraft, principal avionics and all software in-house in their Hawthorne facility, which is unusual for the aerospace industry. Nevertheless, SpaceX still has more than 3,000 suppliers with some 1,100 of those delivering to SpaceX nearly weekly.


TERRESTRIAL BENEFITS Closer to earth, SpaceX reusable rockets that can launch heavy payloads into space could eventually help solve the world’s energy problems, according to a leading space expert from London’s Kingston University. Senior lecturer in astronautics Dr Adam Baker said that


what Musk had really achieved with the 6 February launch was something much more important – successfully testing an almost fully reusable rocket system that significantly reduces the cost of lifting vast payloads into orbit. “The sight of the most powerful rocket in the world lifting off successfully and then landing two of its booster stages at the same time was really amazing,” Baker says. “But much more exciting than


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