SpaceX plans to send a ship to Mars in 2018

Today, the company SpaceX announced the most interesting news: the ship will be sent to Mars in 2018. As far as one can understand, initially it is a question of an unmanned, automatic expedition. The ship will be sent on a Falcon Heavy booster rocket, this is a larger version of the Falcon 9. The ship will land on Mars, and the company's specialists will receive information on the course of the landing, which will make it possible to draw conclusions on the delivery of cargo to Mars.

If all goes well, then SpaceX will be the first private company whose spacecraft sat on the surface of another planet. As for the spacecraft that will go to Mars, it will be Red Dragon - a modified version of the transport that delivers cargo to the ISS. Red Dragon is equipped with eight SuperDraco engines that are powerful enough to land a capsule on Mars. The landing principle, in principle, resembles the technology that SpaceX uses to return the first stage of the Falcon9 to Earth.

Such a landing allows you to deliver a fairly large amount of payload to the planet. Until now, the Curiosity rover weighing almost 1 ton was the heaviest object dropped to Mars.
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Wikipedia tells us that in March 2014 it was reported that the Red Dragon concept could be used by NASA as a cheaper way to accomplish the Mars Sample Return mission with the delivery of samples of Martian soil to Earth. According to preliminary calculations, Red Dragon will be able to make a soft landing on the surface of Mars with about 2 tons of payload. This is more than 2 times the current record set by NASA's Sky Crane, which lowered the Curiosity 899 kg rover onto the surface of the red planet in August 2012. The larger volume and mass of the payload will allow the transfer of collected samples in Earth orbit (the original Mars Sample Return scenario implied the transfer of samples in the Martian orbit), which will reduce the potential risks and the cost of the mission.