Breaking News
Spokane Fire: Prepping Our Equipment to Head Out
80x Bigger Than Enron: $5.1 Trillion Fraud That Can Collapse Treasuries, Spark Civil War
Amish community fined nearly $500,000 for failing to download ArriveCan app
Iran Issues Six Demands on the US to Re-Open the Strait
Top Tech News
What could possibly go wrong? Scientists use AI to design new viruses
Dual-motor suitcase drive underpins 3,000-hp hypercar
DoorDash Wins Federal Approval To Fly Its Own Delivery Drones
Shade-Resistant Solar Cells Retain 97% Efficiency After 2,000 Hours of Testing
20 Ancient Engineering SECRETS
Stonehenge Was Reanalyzed by AI -- And the Findings Are Hard to Explain
After Years Of Delays, Aptera Is Finally Preparing To Build Customer Cars
'When you kill it, it doesn't die': the jellyfish that has cracked the secret of immorta
Archer Aviation debuts Halo autonomous VTOL, Thunder's commercial twin
US Telecoms Slide On Starlink Mobile Threat; Bernstein Sees It As A "Jab, But No Knockout Yet**
SpaceX fast-tracks Mars plans and shoots for 2018 launch of unmanned lander
In any case, SpaceX has just announced plans to have one of its Dragon spacecraft on its way to the Red Planet as soon as 2018, four years earlier than anticipated.
NASA currently has unmanned rovers trawling the surface of Mars for signs of life, but if some of that red rock could be hauled back and prodded by scientists in fully equipped laboratories here on Earth the search may become more fruitful. NASA is preparing to send another rover to Mars in 2020 that will collect rock and soil samples, but the agency had no ironclad plan for how these might be returned to Earth.
Enter SpaceX and its unmanned Dragon capsule, which made history in 2012 as the first commercial spacecraft to carry cargo to the ISS and also return cargo to Earth. SpaceX had been at looking at modifying the Dragon spacecraft as an unmanned lander for the Martian surface, and last year this idea piqued the interest of NASA researchers.