Mars Landers

[Ash19256]

Essentially, this is a request that, when you get around to doing the "Mars Exploration" timeline, you also include the parts to make actual Mars lander proposals. I've included links to a personal favorite, as what appears to be NASA's latest Design Reference Architecture Mars lander.

North American Rockwell Mars Excursion Module

This is the NAR Mars Excursion Module. In it's "Large Mission" configuration, it can support a crew of 4 for 30 days on the Martian surface - with a secondary supply and/or habitation module landed, it could likely support that crew for longer than 30 days. It would also be able to return that crew to a mothership that's in a highly elliptical orbit of Mars, rather than an easier to reach circular orbit, although it could do the latter if need be.

The real major problem with the NAR MEM, from a development stand-point, is that it's main oxidizer choice was arguably worse than that of the RD-270M - the 270M merely used the highly toxic pentaborane, while the NAR MEM's descent and ascent engines were intended to utilize FLOX/CH4 - a massively corrosive mixture of liquid fluorine and liquid oxygen, oxidizing methane. This was primarily to allow for 6.2 km/s of ascent stage delta-V given the constrained size of the tanks available for use by the MEM's designers at the time. If you don't want to add engines using that compound, you could instead provide an extended stay habitat/lab version of the lander, and then delete some of the capability from the MEM itself to free up volume for use by normal LOX/LH2 tankage (or LOX/CH4, if you didn't mind potentially making it possible to replace the FLOX/CH4 aerospike with some sort of "mini-Raptor" producing ~600-1,000 kN of thrust).

Mars DRA 5.0 Lander

These are the current top-running DRA 5.0 Mars lander proposals - basically, what NASA's mission architects think would be needed for a Mars mission using as much current tech as possible. Major things that would be needed to make this possible in KSP - either a Procedural Aeroshell option for fairing bases or some form of Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, methalox engines of appropriate size, and some form of ISRU able to provide enough LOX to fill up the MAV in a useful time frame (ie., fast enough that the CH4 won't have boiled off by the time you can safely have a crew arrive on Mars).

Once all of those are available, people could theoretically build something like the DRA 5.0 landers with existing parts, although dedicated CH4 parts for the landers would still be neat.

[Its-Just-Luci]

For sure! This was actually pretty much what I was planning for the Martian timeline. Pretty much everything that can have any sort of possible real-world source will.

[mkkostroma]

If you're considering mars landers, would the horizontal lander concepts proposed for Constellation possibly be on the table? I love them and have never seen anyone attempt them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUBhn3_P3hU

[Ash19256]

Regarding the Constellation horizontal landers, that's pretty much the "rigid aeroshell/horizontal packaging" option for the DRA 5.0 lander, just with some variations on parts.