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Private Mars Landing Mission to Beat SpaceX


Mr. Mueller said the size and shape of the capsule would be the same as that used for the InSight mission. “It’s like using the same heat-shielding material, the same parachute design,” he said. “So we’re just using what NASA has heavily analyzed and proven for every mission of this scale that has gone to Mars successfully.”

Mr. Mueller said that the lander would be about the same size as InSight but lighter. The basic configuration won’t even include solar panels and won’t last long, just until its battery is depleted.

Mueller said Impulse began talking with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which manages the InSight mission, this year.

However, a spokesman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said there was not much work between the lab and Impulse yet. “It looks like we’ve had some preliminary discussions with Impulse about this,” said Andrew Good, a spokesman. “But while they’ve managed to meet with us this year, that meeting hasn’t happened yet.”

NASA Mars Exploration Program Director Eric Ianson said through a spokesman at the agency’s headquarters that NASA does not have any direct communication with Impulse and that they have no insight into the situation. Specifics of what the company is looking for.

Relativity isn’t the only private space company to announce planetary exploration missions.

In 2020, Rocket Lab says it is planning to send a small craft in 2023 that will follow Venus and dropped a probe to see if there could be signs of life in the dense atmosphere. It also has a modest NASA contract to launch two small orbiters to Mars as early as 2024. But Rocket Lab has had 25 successful launches of its small Electron rocket, and last month it sent CAPSTONE, another small NASA-funded mission, to the moon. (It will get there in November).

A few years ago, SpaceX also had a modest Mars plan, which it later abandoned.

In 2016, the company announced that a version of Crew Dragon astronaut capsule – without any passengers on board – will travel to the Martian surface as early as 2018. In 2017, SpaceX canceled these plans, known as Red Dragon, after it changed its equipment next to the sleeping compartment splashing in the ocean instead of using rocket engines to place on land. (Water landings don’t work on Mars, where there’s no running water.)



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