Why go to the Moon but not land there? I mean, Mars, say, I can see doing that with: It’s pretty hard to land on and take off from Mars. But a lunar landing and takeoff is easy, compared with getting all the way out there to begin with.
I assume landing on the Moon would drive up the cost of the flight a lot. And of course it adds risk because you might get stuck there. In Apollo they could not test fire the engine on the top of the lander before it took off. Maybe now they would do a test fire. Moon landing has been done but that does not make it easy or cheap.
A space station is the last place you’d want someone chewing the scenary.
Delta-v from lunar orbit to the surface is ~1.8 km/s, and the round trip is 3.6 km/s. You also need to get in and out of lunar orbit, adding another ~1.4 km/s.
In contrast, a free return trajectory to the Moon and back (that swings by the Moon but doesn’t enter orbit) is around 3.2 km/s. It’s not at all easy to add another 5 km/s on top of that. And there are no freebies with aerobraking around the Moon.
Mars landing, while challenging in a technical sense, is “easy” in a physics sense–the aerobraking allows landing with <1 km/s delta V (and no insertion costs, either). Taking off is harder, at 4.1 km/s, though there are more resources available and so propellant manufacture is more feasible than on the Moon.
Not sure what that has to do with this thread but, if you want to pay the hefty ticket price, you can take a ride on Zero-G (basically the Vomit Comet for tourists).
As for Tom Cruise, if he can wrangle a flight to the ISS in the guise of doing a movie I say I’d try to do the same. Getting a trip to space is no easy thing (yet) and if I could convince NASA to send me so I could do a podcast or something and they said yes I’d happily go while everyone screamed what BS it was in envy.
I think NASA has even more advantages of such activity because it attracts society’s attention to ISS and maybe NASA can have some other budget except government for space missions.