I think this is pretty cool. Supposedly next year SpaceX will send 2 tourists on a trip around the moon.
If I were one of the ultra rich I think I’d be in for the risk and the money…even at double that $20 million a seat price it would be worth it (if I had billions :p). I wonder who it is who have plunked down that kind of money…
AROUND the moon? Hell, yes! If I could afford it (and if I could pass the physical), I’d sign up in a heartbeat, regardless of the risk.
I was not aware that there was any rocket currently in existence capable of this.
I’m guessing it’s one of the Falcon 9 variants…probably the Falcon 9 Heavy, though I’m not sure it’s really ready for a full on launch with people on board by next year. I’m pretty sure that to just do a lunar fly by though you don’t need anything as robust as the Saturn 9 though since you don’t need the lander.
I wonder if they are planning to televise the whole flight. I’d love to watch that. I was just a kid when the last Apollo flew, and it would be cool to see another manned flight that went by the moon. I also wonder if any of the X-Prize folks are thinking about trying to have their robots catch a lift to the moon as well. 
raises hand Can we wait to board the rocket until after the cryogenic helium system has finished fueling?
It would be life changingly cool. I’d like to know what kind of physical and psychological tests the passengers will need to pass beforehand. That’s some serious Gs on the body, emotional stresses, etc. I got a little freaked out just by the simulation at Disney.
I’ll believe it when it happens.
Seriously, it’s easy to say you’re gonna do something like this, but given that so far, SpaceX hasn’t done a manned flight past the very edge of what we consider ‘space,’ not even an orbital flight yet, I don’t believe they’re anywhere near ready to go around the moon and back.
I’m guessing you mean the Saturn 5. But how much difference does the lander make? Most of the payload at launch is probably fuel, either way.
The (FH) Falcon Heavy (formerly called the Falcon 9 Heavy)
I believe he was correcting the reference to Saturn 9 in the quote, not the Falcon.
Well, of course he was. :smack:
Oh well, I’ll go sit over over here on the Group W bench.
The Falcon Heavy is supposed to launch within 6 months. They’ve been saying that for a while, but people have spotted FH hardware actually moving around, so there’s a good chance that it’s almost there.
The Dragon 2 has more than enough capability, especially as this will be on a free-return trajectory. I’m not sure if they plan on using any capsule propellant but there shouldn’t be any big maneuvers involved aside from the landing.
The passengers will obviously be trained, but not anywhere close to Apollo levels. They won’t be piloting it in any way. Just spam in a can (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’ll be a gentle ride up. Mice do it all the time.
Time to buy Powerball tickets!
Apollo 8 went to lunar orbit but didn’t land. It was roughly 2.5 days outbound, 1 day orbiting the Moon, and 2.5 days returning.
Assuming, with no particular basis, that Falcon’s speeds are similar but they’re just swinging around the Moon once, that says the total trip duration is around 5 days.
That’s quite awhile to be amateur spam in a can. Psychological stress will be an issue after enough time in a pretty immobile environment. 5 days is enough to need to plan to poop once or twice, eat 10 times, pee 20 times, be really stinky, sleep well or poorly 4 times, etc. Most of it in zero G in close confines.
I’d go on the second mission if I could afford it. I wonder how big the overlap is between people with that kind of scratch and people willing to deal with the stressors? ISTM those two prerequisites tend to select for different people.
The SpaceX press release is here.
Confirmed (unsurprisingly) that it’s a Dragon 2 on Falcon Heavy. The moon mission won’t fly until the first NASA crew missions (to the ISS) have started.
Pic of FH side (booster) core on the road. You can tell it’s a booster due to the nosecone. Normal first stages have a flat-topped interstage on one end.
The Ars Technica article mentioned 400,000 miles which if true woul beat the current max distance humans have been from the Earth.
Current reform is from the crew of Apollo 13 at 401,171 km (248,655 miles)
Brian
And with only two passengers, the opportunity to blame others is even further diminished:
Cernan: Where did that come from?
Stafford: Get me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.
Young: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.
Cernan: I don’t think it’s one of mine.
Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.
Young: God Almighty.
And speaking of bio needs, we don’t know that the two passengers aren’t a couple. We could conceivably have the first members of the 240,000-mile high club here. Or maybe the light-second-high club?
Good reference. At 400K miles apogee they’re ballpark 160% of the distance to the Moon. One thing the [del]spam[/del] passengers will NOT experience is any meaningful amount of time close to the Moon for good up-close viewing. Even if the orbit passes pretty close to the Moon that won’t last long as they’ll zoom past it at pretty good speed on the way out and again on the way back.
If the mission takes a week vice my 5 day guess that increases all the life support / creature comfort difficulties at least pro rata if not more.
OTOH, Dragon is sized to carry up to 7 people to ISS. Putting just two people in there will be more like 2 people living a week in a family wagon than 2 people living a week in a Corvette. That’ll help a bunch.
SpaceX has yet to execute any crewed flight whatsoever. The launch phase of crewed flight isn’t really that much more difficult than an uncrewed payload, of course–there is really essentially nothing you can do during either except read telemetry and hope that you didn’t forget to lockwire that fill & drain valve cap that always manages to work its way loose in ground vibration testing–but once on orbit the workload can become severe if there is any kind of anomaly or one of the passengers starts having medical or emotional problems, and once the booster fires a transLunar injection maneuver, it is going to be out on its own for 5-7 days, depending on trajectory. That is a long time to be sharing a capsule with the interior space of a small van with another person no matter how initially enthused you are about the prospect, and whereas the Apollo astronauts knew the systems of the Apollo CSM as well as many of the engineers that worked on them, it sounds like these passengers are just going to understand the rudiments of operating basic interior controls. Given the history of near failures on the Gemini and Apollo missions (nearly every mission had at least one significant anomaly, and Neil Armstrong is personally responsible for preventing both a Gemini and Apollo mission from ending in failure) advertising that they are going to do a single test flight and then start shipping paying customers is risky to the absurd.
I can understand why space enthusiasts would want to fly on such a mission, “regardless of the risks,” for the sheer thrill, but I do not understand why a company focused on wanting to develop and mature commercially-viable space launch industry would engage in a reckless and functionally pointless venture like this which, when a failure occurs (and based upon prior experience will almost certainly occur within the first ten flights) it will be held up to great public scruitiny and potentially enormous fiscal liability. And no, the “gentleman adventurer” contracts will not imdemnify the company in the case of a failure found to be due to negligence or foreseeable problems, which I pointed out in an interview with a space launch startup (not SpaceX) that wanted to invest heavily in space tourism as a revenue stream while waiting for the broader commercial market to evolve. As a stunt, it will provide great publiciy if they succeed, and potentially devastating to the entire spaceflight industry if they fail. As a source of revenue, space tourism makes no sense unless the price is somewhere around the cost of a chartered executive aircraft because there is just not enough of a base to provide continuing revenue.
Stranger
Wanna bet its an attempt to force NASA into committing for a couple of flights? It could be easily we going to use Gentlemen adventurers mmmkay, oh ok if you insist we’ll take astronauts.
The earlier flight like this was Zond 5, which carried tortoises.
How does the hardware compare wth the proposed Dragon-Falcon system?
Where are they saying this? The press release says that Dragon 2 will have several flights for NASA, including crewed flights, before any private missions. The Falcon Heavy will also fly a few times before the moon mission.