The race to send a private space mission to Mars is too close to call. It might be possible.
In the past, Musk has said that he would like to send people to Mars. The company wants to build a giant spaceship.
A small start-up founded by an engineer who used to head rocket engine development at SpaceX is planning to send a robotic landers to Mars. The two companies say they can do it as soon as two and a half years from now.
The way that SpaceX wanted to do things at the edge of crazy and ambitious and audacious was an inspiration to Timothy Ellis.
The best people to work on those kinds of goals are attracted to them. Some of the other companies are more audacious than us.
If a commercial Mars mission succeeds, it could open a new market in which institutions, companies and national space agencies could send cargo to the red planet.
Several companies are trying to make money by sending money to the moon for NASA to use. It would be difficult and far away. The cost of a NASA mission to Mars includes sophisticated instruments.
Mr. Ellis wouldn't say how much the mission would cost, but he did say that investment money and revenue from contracts it has to launch commercial satellites could be enough to cover the cost. A deal has been made with OneWeb to take broadband satellites to space.
There is a chance that we can do it with what we have.
There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical.
Several space companies went out of business a decade ago because they couldn't find enough asteroids to mine. Mr Musk gives overly optimistic predictions. He said in 2016 that the Interplanetary Transport System would be the first uncrewed flight to Mars.
Mr. Ellis doesn't have Mr. Musk's record of achieving most of his big promises.
The company hasn't launched any rockets. There is a chance that the first flight of the Terran 1 rocket will take place in a few weeks. The Mars mission relies on a larger rocket, Terran R, which is comparable in size and lifting capability to a Falcon 9 rocket, which has flown 31 times so far this year. Mr. Ellis said that the design won't be ready until later in the 20th century.
Even less of a track record can be found at Impulse Space. The man who founded it is a veteran of the space business and was the first employee. Mr. Muller was the leader of the development of the rocket engines.
Mr.Mueller retired from the company. Impulse was started a year after he started it.
It isn't hard enough if people think it's difficult and you can't do it We have to do things that people think can't be done.
It is difficult to land on Mars, arriving at some 12,000 miles per hour, not burning up in the atmosphere and then coming to a stop on the ground in one piece. China and NASA have both had success on the red planet.
The spaceship would detach from the rocket's upper stage and travel to Mars in nine months.
A capsule with a lander would be part of the voyage to Mars. Near Mars, the capsule would separate from the cruise stage and enter the atmosphere for a landing.
The size and shape of the capsule will be the same as the one used for InSight. He said it was similar to using the same heat shield materials. Every mission of this size that has gone to Mars has been analyzed and proven by NASA.
The landers would be about the size of InSight. The basic configuration wouldn't work for long unless the batteries were exhausted.
The InSight mission is managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, according to Mr.Mueller.
A spokesman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said there hadn't been a lot of work done between the two. Andrew Good said that they had had some preliminary discussions with the company. They have been trying to meet with us this year.
The director of NASA's Mars exploration program, Eric Ianson, said through a spokeswoman at the agency's headquarters that NASA had not had any direct communication with the company.
A number of private space companies have announced planetary exploration missions.
In 2020, Rocket Lab said it was going to send a small craft to Venus to look for signs of life in the atmosphere. It has a contract with NASA to send two small satellites to Mars. CAPSTONE, a small NASA-financed mission, was sent to the moon by Rocket Lab last month. In November, it will arrive there.
The company announced in 2016 that it was going to send a version of its Crew Dragon capsule to the surface of Mars as early as next year. After changing the capsule design to splash down in the ocean, the Red Dragon plans were canceled. There is no water on Mars.
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