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A quote from an article on the Verge says "Musk declined to comment on the exact cost of the trip, but said it was “comparable” or a little more than the cost of a crewed mission to the International Space Station." Does anyone have a rough estimate how much a manned mission to the ISS currently costs?
> We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Can't wait to hear who booked this trip! Definitely one of the coolest ways to spend a lot of superfluous money :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. Note that the press release says: Most importantly, we would like to thank NASA, without whom this would not be possible. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission. Your tax dollars, if you are American, helped pay for this. Thank yo…
The tax dollars we spent on this would probably have funded about twelve seconds of the Iraq occupation instead, so I'd say sure, easily worth it.
Finally the tin-foil hats can be satiated when these tourists see the 50-ish year old flag on the moon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. Note that the press release says: Most importantly, we would like to thank NASA, without whom this would not be possible. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission. Your tax dollars, if you are American, helped pay for this. Thank yo…
> if not, was it worth the risk? yes
On edit: meant for the parent comment, but its parent instead
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. Note that the press release says: Most importantly, we would like to thank NASA, without whom this would not be possible. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission. Your tax dollars, if you are American, helped pay for this. Thank yo…
> if not, was it worth the risk? yes
> We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Can't wait to hear who booked this trip! Definitely one of the coolest ways to spend a lot of superfluous money :)
It could be Elon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't really matter what it exhausts, it expends energy either way. If it ran on hydrogen, you'd probably have to use electrical energy to produce that. Even if you somehow got the hydrogen "for free", there are other things you could use it for. This is all quite separate from the moral issue, to which I have nothing to add.
> Doesn't really matter what it exhausts, it expends energy either way. Energy usage is not the only consideration, and it certainly does matter what it exhausts. Exhausting an inert gas is definitely preferable to a greenhouse gas, which would be preferable to exhausting anthrax, etc. The composition of the exhaust is going to affect the positivity of the public reaction to a billionaire burning it into public air s…
You may have a point regarding the public perception; don't really care to weigh in.
Just looking up records: the furthest anyone has ever been from Earth is Apollo 13 who passed 158 miles above the lunar surface. I imagine that would be a pretty easy record to break, if you're doing a translunar flight anyway then getting a bit higher doesn't take much more energy (source: played a lot of Kerbal). On the other hand the passengers might prefer a close-up view of the Moon to a record.
But the moon isn't at a fixed distance. It's possible that one of the other cislunar or landing Apollo missions was more distant, geocentrically, even with their standard 69-mile lunar orbital heights.
Wow. This sends so many thoughts cascading through my head that I'm dizzy. Some things to consider, China has been working up to getting a space capability to send people to the Moon with the full backing of the government funding, by 2035[1]. They started in 2003. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and they are saying they will fly someone around the moon next year? Dragon has the deltaV to land on the moon (not sure if it…
> The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. Note that the press release says: Most importantly, we would like to thank NASA, without whom this would not be possible. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission. Your tax dollars, if you are American, helped pay for this. Thank yo…