SpaceX appears to have pulled the plug on its Red Dragon plans

Musk said his company has come up with a “far better” approach to landing on Mars.

In recent weeks, there have been rumors that SpaceX is no longer planning to send an uncrewed version of its Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2020, or later. Now those rumors about the Red Dragon concept have been largely confirmed.

The company had planned to use the propulsive landing capabilities on the Dragon 2 spacecraft—originally developed for the commercial crew variant to land on Earth—for Mars landings in 2018 or 2020. Previously, it had signed an agreement with NASA to use some of its expertise for such a mission and access its deep-space communications network.

On Tuesday, however, during a House science subcommittee hearing concerning future NASA planetary science missions, Florida Representative Bill Posey asked what the agency was doing to support privately developed planetary science programs. Jim Green, who directs NASA's planetary science division, mentioned several plans about the Moon and asteroids, but he conspicuously did not mention Red Dragon.

After this hearing, SpaceX spokesman John Taylor didn't return a response to questions from Ars about the future of Red Dragon.

Musk confirms

Then, during a speech Wednesday at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference, Musk confirmed that the company is no longer working to land Dragon propulsively for commercial crew. (Although initially the company had moved to water landings, SpaceX had maintained that in future crew contracts with NASA, it would use Dragon's thrusters to land on land.)

But no longer. "Yeah, that was a tough decision," Musk acknowledged Wednesday with a sigh. It had to be a somewhat humbling one, too, after Musk bragged during the Dragon 2 reveal in 2014 that this vehicle showed how a 21st century spacecraft should land—not with parachutes in the water.

"The reason we decided not to pursue that heavily is that it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport," Musk explained Wednesday. "There was a time when I thought the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where you've got a base heat shield and side mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars. But now I'm pretty confident that is not the right way."

Musk added that his company has come up with a "far better" approach to landing on Mars that will be incorporated into the next iteration of the company's proposed Mars transportation hardware. Musk laid out an initial version of this "Interplanetary Transport System" in 2016, but he has said an updated architecture is coming soon, perhaps at the 2017 International Astronautical Conference in Adelaide, Australia. The event will be held from September 25 to 29.

The new Mars architecture will be "more affordable" and slightly smaller, Musk said. One of the main criticisms of his initial plan, including that of a review by Ars, is that although the concept may have been technically sound, it was not backed by the financial or political resources to see it through development.