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So, hmm, we wants to send people around the moon, a year and a half from now, with a rocket he never tested and with a capsule that never flew? I expect half of the directors of SpaceX to resign in the next two days...
Not sure how this differs from Apollo.
> 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 :)
Huge SpaceX fan here, but I've heard from various news sources that the company is famous for aggressively posting dates and then slowly letting them slide. Might that be the case here? (Still, even if it's 2 or 3 years, wow!)
The main factor supporting their claim is that they have a very strong incentive to be ferrying crew to/from the ISS around this time, so barring any big mishaps with Falcon Heavy (supposed to be ready this summer/fall), all the pieces should be in place if not by next year, then certainly just a year or two later. Which, as you mentioned, is just as impressive!
"...The draft report from the GAO, which is Congress’ investigative arm, also concluded that neither SpaceX nor the Boeing Co. is likely to conduct regular space taxi flights to the space station by 2018..."
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/gao-journal-spacex-rocket-turbo...
While this feat depends on hitting a lot of intermediate milestones - Falcon Heavy Test, Crew Dragon Unmanned to ISS, Crew Dragon manned to ISS, etc, there is no "show-stopper" that is apparent right now. I like how they have avoided committing to the much harder "landing on the Moon and then return" scenario.
We choose to not go to the moon, but do the other things, not because they are hard, but because they are relatively easy, and we can make a quick buck.
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?
So, hmm, we wants to send people around the moon, a year and a half from now, with a rocket he never tested and with a capsule that never flew? I expect half of the directors of SpaceX to resign in the next two days...
Absolutely incredible. This will be the furthest that humanity has journeyed away from Earth in a very long time. However it is worth noting that there hasn't been a single crewed Dragon flight yet. There are demonstator flights scheduled for this year though with the first NASA crewed mission slated for May 2018. That's an incredibly aggressive timeline but if anyone can achieve it, SpaceX can. The long duration fli…
Sometimes i wonder if that's an strategy from the management team to put pressure in the engineers.
Who are the two "private citizens"? Seems to be mere urge of "universal human exploration" to go around the moon and not landing on it, etc. isn't doing much exploring, but rather taking a lot of risk on a manned spacecraft that has never been tested with people.
Who are the two "private citizens"? Seems to be mere urge of "universal human exploration" to go around the moon and not landing on it, etc. isn't doing much exploring, but rather taking a lot of risk on a manned spacecraft that has never been tested with people.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Two of his freind rich enough, geeky enough, to go first.