NASA reveals their new spaceship for Mars.

The hell with their 40 year old design aesthetics.
I'm still waiting for my flying car and full body pneumatic tubes.

i think we are at the bottle neck,it seems mars is the the limitation now.the most important is new power for spaceship,heat transform engineering can not help us go out of solar system.

Originally posted by Maslo
Why they wont just use SpaceX Dragon capsule? It uses internal LAS boosters which are able to perform soft landing on every surface in the solar system, and is fully reusable. And it was developed from a blank sheet to the first demonstration flight in just over four years for about $300 million. Imagine what would SpaceX do with 5 billion..

Dragon spacecraft

What's a LAS booster? Typically, LAS stands for Launch Abort System, which are rocket engines attached to the capsule that would pull the capsule away from the launch vehicle in the event of a problem during launch.

Dragon is most definitely not designed to "soft land," anywhere. "Soft landing" refers to using a rocket engine to slow the vehicle down and touch down, as the Lunar Module did in Apollo. Dragon's landing method is by parachute into the ocean.

reply to post by nataylor

What's a LAS booster? Typically, LAS stands for Launch Abort System, which are rocket engines attached to the capsule that would pull the capsule away from the launch vehicle in the event of a problem during launch.

Yep. Dragon capsule will have internal LAS boosters, and it can also be used for in-space propulasion and soft landings. From wiki:

SpaceX proposes to develop an "integrated launch abort system design" for the Dragon spacecraft, with several claimed advantages over the more traditional tractor tower approaches used on all prior manned space capsules. These advantages include:

[30] the provision of escape capability later into the launch profile, "all the way to orbit"

reusability since the integrated escape system returns to earth with the spacecraft, and reduces mission cost

improves crew safety by the elimination of one "separation event" from the launch profile

the escape engines may be usable during the landing phase "for a precise land landing of Dragon under rocket power." The emergency parachute will be retained in this design as a redundant backup landing system.

Dragon spacecraft

CGI video of a Dragon propulsive landing:

www.youtube.com...

Originally posted by Isildur1
What a waste of money. 5 billion dollars thrown away towards a planet that will never be inhabited by any living creature or human. Use the money for an actual cause for once. This much money could feed a few African nations for YEARS.

Why should they be given hand outs?