The main problem in the article is the margins of risk. A couple kilometers is to small for Rob Manning to feel comfortable with and a few tenths of a second is to short a time to make judgments in. Fact is machines will be making the calls all the way down and sure would help if you made your lander lighter than his. If he was designing the LM landing on the Moon he would have had the same kind of "problems" with 30 to 10 seconds of fuel left at landing and the amount of acceleration at that touch down.
There are other methods to use such as some very large very light inflatable heatshields and a drag drogue chute of a sort not see so far.
It would help to understand the dynamics of supersonic decent thrusters as well. There might be value elsewhere in understanding that...maybe in modeling hurricanes.
It also would help greatly if the Martian atmospheric model detail was better...
Space/Science » in reply to 60 tonnes and counting...
re: 60 tonnes and counting...
The whole thread (33 posts)
- No way to land large fast payloads on Mars
- I still think they should revive the original Project Orion
- re: No way to land large fast payloads on Mars
- If only..
- Quite True Currently
- Falling into Mars.
- Did my reply get deleted?
- Nuclear rockets
- Very interesting!
- If it means a brief stopover in martian parking orbit, before descending, I don't see the problem.