To The Red Planet with the Kuiper Launch Coalition and Hypergols
Image Credit: Amazon Ten days ago Amazon announced they had made a deal to purchase a huge amount of launch capacity to launch their Kuiper constellation. Not including the 9 previously bought Atlas V launches, we're looking at roughly 2000 tons of VLEO launch capacity with 38 Vulcan-Centaur 6, 18 Ariane 64, and 12 New Glenn launches (with an option for 15 more). I recently claimed that this would be enough to launch multiple crewed Mars landing missions using storable hypergolic propellants, and I was asked to show my work. So here it is: The Goal I will choose a relatively small but generally acceptable crew size of 4 and try to fit three long-stay conjunction class missions within a ~2 kiloton upmass budget. The first mission would be an uncrewed demo in 2033 that would include landing components of a Mars base. It would be followed by two crewed missions, in 2035 and 2037, that would also bring more cargo. The crew would travel to Mars in a modular Mars Transit Ve...