SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

spacex.com

1,747 pointsrunesoerensen488 comments

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 has enough to get off again though) and SpaceX certainly has the expertise in building spacecraft that land.

The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. That one really blows my mind. For so long it was only countries that could do something like that, now it is nearly within reach of individuals.

The UN has treaties about claiming (or not) the moon by a nation state, but there isn't anything about a privately funded and established outpost that wants to declare independence. All this time I imagined that some country would establish a base there, and grudgingly offer up some space for non-state use, and now there is this possibility of a private facility that states have to ask permission to visit? That is priceless.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/04/29/man-on-the-moo...

> 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 you and congratulations - if it works out; if not, was it worth the risk?

EDIT: In response to many below, remember that the U.S. military isn't the only alternative use of the money. Taxpayers could keep it, or it could go to other programs such as education and health. (Personally, I'd happily pay more taxes for more space exploration, education, health, and military necessary for security.)

Rockets (or any research) > bombs any day of the week.

Yes, my tax dollars going towards research (even indirectly) is better than the way most of my money is spent

Historically rocket research has been funded to develop the capability to deliver bombs.

Which seems to imply that military spending is pretty beneficial for humanity as long as it's spent on researching new cool ways of killing each other, and not on actually using them.

Military spending in WWII led to the invention or development of (to name a few) penicillin, radio navigation, synthetic oil and rubber, jet engines, nuclear power and computers. However some of these were pretty close to being invented even before the war, so it's hard to say how much the war progressed technology.

> However some of these were pretty close to being invented even before the war

Penicillin, for one, was discovered over a decade prior to WWII. A method of mass production was developed in 1940, but have no idea how much that had to do with the war.

> Which seems to imply that military spending is pretty beneficial for humanity as long as it's spent on researching new cool ways of killing each other, and not on actually using them.

The sixties-era DARPA method: throw a bunch of defense money at a bunch of really smart people without getting too specific about how much of the research should proceed.

Exactly what I had in mind.

The military is something like 20% of the budget. That's not where most of your money is going.

You're including social security and medicare/aid, which is not entirely money that can be easily diverted. Especially social security. Without those, defense is the lion's share of the budget, and with Trump's new proposal, even more so.

Sure... if you wall off most of the budget and then look at the rest, defense is the lion's share.

But that makes no sense.

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.

Along those lines, just the air conditioning for tents in Iraq and Afghanistan circa 2011 eclipsed NASA's budget http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-our-military-cos...

As a taxpayer (who was just reminded this past weekend of how much that is :-) I'm really glad that NASA had enough budget to spend on the Commercial Crew program. Given that the NASA budget of $18.5B[1] is a rounding error on the overall budget $3,540B[2], seriously it's a half a percent. And commercial crew was only $1.2B [ibid] of that NASA budget. So less than .05%. Again rounding error.

And with that money they are getting two different spacecraft that can fly missions. So I think it was a great way for NASA to contract out the development of a crew capsule they could use on their missions.

That one of the companies that participated has done so in such a way that they can make a commercially feasible 'tourist' vehicle out of it? That blows my mind.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NASA_FY_2016_...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/topics/budget

If instead of increasing military spending 54 billion, we gave it all to NASA, we could be quadrupling NASA's budget.

The risk is that more money does not always mean more progress. Government organizations tend to grow all by themselves (would be interesting if you could legislate some productivity targets into budget expansion maybe?)

NASA should pass it on to Elon.

If we establish a permanent Mars colony, that would really increase security for all of mankind.

Building more nuclear weapons is NOT increasing security.

Why is it so important to send people on these missions outside of some 21st century version of manifest destiny? NASA could do so much more with its limited funding if it just cut out all the humans.

This mission's passengers appear to be funding it, at least in part.

In that case we're using the wrong word. Tourists go on "tours", not "missions".

Carl Sagan used to make that point. From a science perspective, you get a much, much better bang for your buck sending robots. But as Larry Niven pointed out to Sagan, every time you convince someone that manned space doesn't make sense you convince them there's no reason to go into space at all. Yes, NASA could do a lot more with its budget if it didn't do manned space, but if it didn't do manned space NASA might not exist at all.

  > every time you convince someone that manned space doesn't make sense you convince them there's no reason to go into space at all

That's just well-sounding nonsense. People can appreciate science and exploration even if it does not involve video of humans in outer space. Video or photos of celestial objects are enough reason for the laic public and there are many physical measurements that should be done to advance our knowledge. All this can be done very well and cheaper without humans onboard.

A lot of what any government does is a rounding error on the overall budget, but are still absolutely vital. Those rounding errors don't half add up quickly. I'm pro-space exploration and believe it's worth funding, but this particular argument doesn't strike me as useful. Space exploration and technology development should justify it's costs on the same basis as any other government programs, any number of which of which could be revolutionized by 'small' increases in the overall budget.

> if not, was it worth the risk?

yes

The reason you have a computer that fits in your pocket, much less requires its own room with a reinforced floor is due to the NASA space program.

On edit: meant for the parent comment, but its parent instead

The reason you have a computer that fits in your pocket, much less requires its own room with a reinforced floor is due to the NASA space program.

No. That's a common misconception. ICs were a commercial development, and microprocessors came from the calculator industry.

Pre-IC electronics miniaturization was pushed hard by the USAF; NASA just used it. The USAF had a flyable transistorized computer in 1954, before NASA existed. The Minuteman I missile (1962) carried a transistorized guidance computer.

Also Polaris, a little bit earlier (deployed 1960) had a very small transistorized guidance computer which was the design root of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Polaris was much more of a DDA (digital differential analyzer) than real computer though.

ICBM development is basically a space program with a different budget code though, right?

And a delivery service too - "Your package delivered in 30 minutes or less or next one's free!"

(There at least used to be a Minuteman silo with the door painted like a pizza box with that slogan)

Yes, though there was a divergence later. For various strategic reasons you want your ICBMs to use solid rockets, so while the early manned rockets were liquid fueled ICBMs mated to capsules, money spent on ICBMs today probably doesn't do much for a civilian space program.

On the other hand, I doubt we spend much money upgrading our ICBMs. The technology is mature, and that's an area where "good enough" is, well, good enough.

Tax dollars, yes but not as any kind of subsidy.

Note that NASA encourages its contractors to use their stuff for private missions as well—building more of the things reduces unit price (by amortising development cost) and thus costs for NASA, so it could be that this results in lower overall cost to US taxpayers. In addition it helps collect more data on safety etc, which is in NASA's interest, too.

> 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?

I don't want to downplay SpaceX at all because I'm a huge fan, but isn't flying someone to the moon (and presumably back) more complicated than just flying around the moon and back? As I understand, apart from the challenge of achieving orbital velocity (no small feat), flying around the moon might require ~41% more velocity (assuming escape velocity to orbital velocity being a ratio of something like sqrt(2):1) and you can use the moon's gravity to redirect you back to earth, whereas landing on the moon and returning requires even more energy (slowing down to land + escaping the moon and returning), not to mention the various other technical requirements involved with the landing itself.

"Beyond the moon" makes this sound like it'll be a greater achievement than the Apollo moon landings, but I'm not sure that's really true. Don't get me wrong, the fact that it's a private (ish) company doing this is incredible, just not quite "moon landing" incredible... yet.

Yes, that is exactly right. They are not going to land, for exactly the reasons you say.

Right. SpaceX doesn't have a craft capable of lunar orbit rendezvous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit_rendezvous

so they would need to return to the Earth directly from the surface of the moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_ascent

Direct ascent requires a much larger initial launch mass, i.e., a larger rocket than has ever been built. Since it took the massive Saturn V to complete the Apollo missions using lunar rendezvous, and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is smaller, I don't think they are even close to having the ability to land on the moon and return.

(And that's assuming there's not other insurmountable factors preventing Dragon from landing on the moon and taking off, which there probably are.)

Hopefully someone with more knowledge can chime in.

SpaceX for a landing mission wouldn't try and build a larger rocket, they'd definitely argue to just do multiple launches instead. Fuel tankering is within their area of interest for Mars.

I believe this (mating tanks given multiple missions) is what they were considering. Imagine you have your reusable falcon 9 boost into orbit a 'fuel only' second stage. Land the first stage, put another one on it, and send it up again. Once you have your 'boost pack' up in orbit, presumably docking with each other into a single unit, you launch your crew which attaches to the 'tug' that takes them to the moon.

ULA has a great writeup of how you might do this if you have on orbit refueling capabilities.

And on the one hand it seems like total science fiction but on the other, Elon is talking about next year.

This can be applied to much more than just fuel, mind you. Interplanetary manned vehicles might very well end up looking like space stations, with a bunch of modules docked together in order to provide the necessary creature comforts to sustain a crew for months on end.

In fact, a permanently-in-orbit transfer vehicle might make sense here; have this vehicle run the actual Earth<->Mars transfers, then just shuttle in fuel/supplies/crew on each Earth arrival.

Either way, a Falcon-like reusable launch system makes plenty of sense here in terms of making this sort of thing possible.

> a permanently-in-orbit transfer vehicle might make sense here

Buzz Aldrin is a big proponent of this approach: https://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-ma...

Jet fighters routinely use so much fuel taking off that the first thing they do after gaining altitude is refuel. Rockets can use the same idea.

Yes but as the ULA whitepaper pointed out there are some challenges to doing so in orbit. For one, the lack of gravity makes it hard to pump fuel. You can spin the tanker to achieve fuel settling but now you are both spinning bodies. Then there is handling cryogenic propellants in space, you get nominal bleed off from warming and again ULA had a really interesting design of an internal combustion engine using the bleed off of Hydrogen and Oxygen as a chiller pump. But suffice it to say, its not as easy as it is flying a jet behind a slow re-purposed jetliner, and doing that is already difficult.

> the lack of gravity makes it hard to pump fuel

Evidently this problem is solved, because liquid fuel rockets have been working fine in space since the 60s. (Liquid fuel rockets have their propellants pumped into the chamber.)

> nominal bleed off from warming

Launch the tanker just beforehand. There won't be time for the fuel to bleed off.

Liquid fuel rockets use Surface tension against the slosh baffles to hold fuel in partially full fuel tanks in place.

Ullage motors are used to settle the fuel at the bottom of the tanks, so the main motor pumps can get to it.

Once the main motor starts providing acceleration, the ullage motors are no longer required.

For cross tanking, keeping the ullage motors running for long enough to transfer all the fuel, without the main motors running might be prohibitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor

I didn't know about ullage motors, thanks for the link. The link also says that only very tiny accelerations are needed - so this shouldn't be a big problem for a tanker. Like I hypothesized, the problem has been solved.

it's only been solved if it's demonstrated, which it wasn't.

Bearing in mind that the ullage motors need to be of a type that won't suffer from ullage problems. That implies they cant use the main motor fuel.

The saturn 5 used small solid rockets as ullage motors. Alternatively you could use externally pressurised bladder tanks for a range of non-cryogenic fuels. Cold gas or possibly h2o2 as a monopropellant come to mind. Either option has a comparatively low specific impulse, so even running them at very low overall accelerations for extended time periods is likely to be cost-prohibitive.

I like the suggestion elsewhere of spinning the tank. You could also dock, then spin the whole combination ship. If you abandon the fuel station idea, you could just take the extra fuel tank with you, transferring fuel to your internal tank during a main engine burn, then abandoning the empty tank in a wierd orbit.

Do the fuels have to remain in a cryogenic state in space? Can much larger containers with warmer fuel be used once the fuel is in orbit? I have no idea if this makes any sense.

That's a good question. A big bag of fuel hanging outside is a fine place to store it if you don't care about temperature or pressure. You would need some kind of mechanical means to squish the bag to get the fuel out though, so maybe an accordion with a motorized retractor?

I think you are underestimating expansion ratios (ratio of volume of liquid and gas at reasonable pressure). The ratio for water vapour at sea level is ~1000x. The "large bag" might end up being so large that it's weight is a significant fraction of the weight of the fuel it contains.

Even if you brought up a bag large enough to contain gaseous fuel and oxydizer, before you could actuall use the fuel you'd have to compress it again.

A major problem is pressure. As the fuel heats up and boils off the pressure increases and the tanks have to bleed it off or they'll burst eventually. Also the engine design for cryogenic stages assume a liquid fuel and moving enough gaseous fuel and oxidizer isn't in the current designs.

This is partly because they don't always take off with full tanks which allows for shorter runways and/or safer takeoff. Depending on the ordinance that a jet may have to carry, it starts making more sense to stay a bit lighter until a minimum airspeed is achieved.

The idea of docking modular components in space is a good one though. Perhaps all you really need to do is lift a bunch of fuel tanks since there is plenty of time to perform burns with smaller boosters on longer distance trips.

The SR71 literally leaked fuel until it reached operating temperature. It had something crazy like 2 minutes to rendevous with a tanker after takeoff.

Using "milch cows" seems like a cost effective solution to fueling/supplying a moon run. Of course, the green-eyeshade crews will get to have the last say.

It's not as advantageous as you'd expect, because your ships now have to have docking collars extra sensors, and extra maneuvering capability. The rendezvous will take extra time and fuel, and the extra time means you need more life support for the crew.

Worse, the extra steps involved create extra risk, both for mission failure and to the lives of the crew. You could get to your fuel depot and discover the battery sytem has failed and your depot is tumbling, or a leak caused ice buildup that prevents you from docking. Or the chillers failed and enough oxydizer got vented into space that you can't continue the mission.

That's not to say that LOR is impossible with a smaller payload. Saturn V enabled a large, complex, redundant set of vehicles. The never successfully launched Soviet N1/L3 with half the TLI payload also used LOR but with much lighter vehicles and a smaller crew.

> Right. SpaceX doesn't have a craft capable of lunar orbit rendezvous

Why not? Their Dragon capsules can dock with the ISS; why wouldn't they be able to dock with each, possibly with some kind of adapter? You can imagine one Dragon and a trunk docking with another upper stage that's all fuel tank, heading to the Moon, undocking in orbit, landing, ascending, and rendezvousing in orbit to return home.

The total dv requirements of landing on the Moon and ascending again starting from low Moon orbit is 4 km/s. I haven't done the math, but I suspect that you can put together a workable mission using two Falcon Heavy launches. Now, granted, they don't have all the exact pieces put together quite yet, but I suspect they've been thinking about it.

A lot of the devil here is in the details. You need long term life support that Dragon hasn't proven yet. Deep space communications on the transmit and receive side. Abort scenarios for most or all phases of flight. All of this is untested and requires a huge amount of engineering and manufacturing work. Since this will likely share the same design as the NASA-contracted capsules, these systems will need to pass muster with them. And they don't cut corners.

Minor quibble: you don't need deep space communications. The Moon is laughably close. I am quite confident that we can easily make contact with the existing unmodified Dragon capsules by using something like one of these bad boys: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/goldstone.jpg

Of course it's laughably overkill for the purpose -- amateur radio operators using much smaller equipment can already send and receive signals to each other by bouncing them off the Moon, which has four times the signal attenuation owing to the doubled distance plus a good deal more in losses from the poor reflectivity of the Moon to radio waves.

SpaceX is already docking with the space station which is similar difficulty as launching from the moon and docking in lunar orbit. The problem is getting a rocket with enough fuel on the surface of the moon without damaging it, not the docking in orbit. Which is even easier than doing the same thing from the surface of Mars. The only advantage of Mars is you don't need to burn fuel slowing down but that's more than offset by a significantly deeper gravity well.

On the upside, they can land an un-manned assent vehicle on the surface of Moon / Mars before sending people there. Which can significantly increase your odds of getting back.

PS: Yes, NASA did get to the moon and back several times, but they also took a massive chunk of US GDP to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS...

I don't think either of us know much about this, but I do know that docking with the ISS to unload supplies requires completely different equipment than doing a rendezvous between a lunar lander and a lunar orbiter for Earth return. (That's why I didn't say merely "docking".)

The only craft SpaceX has that can land on Earth or the Moon is Dragon. I am pretty sure Dragon does not have enough delta-v to do a full propulsive landing on the moon (no aerobraking available) and then return to orbit. And they definitely don't have the tech to re-fuel in lunar orbit for the return to Earth. None of this equipment exists.

Not to mention that this would be a totally new lunar strategy, since the Apollo mission returned to earth in the lunar orbiter (Command Module) rather than re-fueling and returning in the lunar lander.

Yea, I am not a rocket guy.

However, the minimum delta V to land on the moon is ~1.72 km/s, and you need another 1.72 km/s to get back into orbit + some safety factor ~2.2-2.4 km/s. By comparison it takes ~8km/s to get from LEO to low moon orbit and back to earth. Though you can reduce this by how hard to hit the earth's atmosphere. So, having fuel to land and take off from the moon is not that much worse than getting to the moon and back.

> By comparison it takes ~8km/s to get from Earth LEO to Moon LEO

No, from Earth LEO some 3.1 km/s will get you to TLO, and then some ~1 km/s will take you to Moon low orbit, so total about 4(+) km/s. 8 km/s is an approximate budget for a round-trip between low orbits.

Sorry, butchered that. I was trying to say the figures are less exact depending on how hard you want to hit the earths upper atmosphere. ~8.2km/s if you want to end up in earth LEO ~8km/s if you want to get back to the earth. You can also save a little if your sending an unmanned craft and don't care how long it takes or skip low moon orbit.

I wonder if spaceX is going to send a permanent colony of bots on moon to make a base there. The latency is a lot lower than Mars and would make a good start.

Sending a couple of humans around moon for tourism is a waste of resources.

Sending a couple of humans around the moon for tourism is a great R&D opportunity, paid for by someone else's money.

See: Apollo 8 mission.

They're said they have no particular interest in going to the Moon as it wouldn't teach them anything useful about going to or living on Mars and would just be a distraction. Of course if someone else wants to contract them to do so and they can make a buck off it, that might be different.

> Sending a couple of humans around moon for tourism is a waste of resources.

One persons waste of resources is another persons revenue. They're not doing it for charity.

They have paying customers. When you're in business to make money, you do what you can bill for.

Though I don't know why anyone would want to spend a week locked in a tiny can like that, let alone pay big bucks for it. There's a limit to the discomfort I'd be willing to endure for bragging rights.

The Moon is a terrible "start" for Mars. They are very different places, and require solving very different problems. In many ways, Mars is a lot easier (the atmosphere can do a lot of the work of slowing you down, you have the raw materials to make methane (the rocket fuel SpaceX will be using), etc).

People tend to think of the Moon as a "staging point" on the way to Mars, but in reality, it would be a significant detour.

So is it possible for them to launch multiple vehicles into Earth LEO, rendezvous with one another and then transfer to Moon LEO?

> I am pretty sure Dragon does not have enough delta-v to do a full propulsive landing on the moon.

The information I'm finding on the internet suggests Dragon 2 should run around 400 m/s of delta-V (it only needs on the order of 200 m/s to go from terminal velocity aerobraking to landed on Earth).

TLI to LLO is 800 m/s, and I'd guess that a Circumlunar return trajectory to LLO transfer would be on that order -- which is already out of the Dragon 2's range and you're only trying to get into orbit on the Moon, not return, and definitely not land or take off again.

Its close enough though that a beefed up Dragon 3 might be able to dock with some kind of space station and refueling dock in lunar orbit, then you just need to have a lunar ferry (Apollo sorta downsized all of this and crammed it all on top of a Saturn V for one-time use -- I'm thinking a bit bigger for the whole system and more cough reusable...)

Dragon cargo berthes with ISS: it pulls close and gets snagged by a human operating an arm. Crew Dragon will dock with the ISS.

Actually, they are Berthing[1][2] the Dragon craft with the ISS, which means something slightly different - grabbed by the thing you are connecting to and pulled in, vs. a (controlled) bumping into the thing. I believe that Nautical terminology is where that comes from, and means the same there e.g. berthing ships with ropes and dock hands.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacec...

2. http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13665/what-is-the-d...

But crewed Dragon V2 will actually dock.

Need to install the new docking module first (the one that was supposed to be installed blew up with CSR-7)

They already launched and mated the second International Docking Adapter already on CRS-9 back in July 2016 so they ISS side is ready.

They'll be able to do LOR in the Dragon 2, which would be ready in time. I question whether they have enough endurance for a lunar landing mission, though, and they would still have to develop a lander.

Between flying to the moon and back (no landing) the only difference is fuel and consumables (air/food). The key capabilities are launch, landing, spacecraft communication and operations, and navigational support for computing and executing maneuvers to get into (and out of) a trans-lunar orbit. The more fuel you have the easier it is on the equipment.

Or to put it differently, the difference is that when you get to the Moon you make an orbital injection burn in order to slow yourself down to the point that you can stay in lunar orbit, and then when your done you make another burn to put you back into the trans-lunar orbit.

When you get back you can either do a high speed re-entry or you can do an Earth orbit injection burn.

You still need a vehicle that can carry people for the duration of the trip. You need to get it into a translunar orbit so that you can get out to the Moon. You need to be able to precisely locate yourself in space relative to the Earth-Moon system and course correct to achieve your orbit goals. All of that stuff has to happen either way.

There is an excellent discussion of the various orbit options for getting to the moon in this paper: http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet103/biesbroek103.pd... definitely worth looking over to get a better appreciation on what is involved.

It's not a greater achievement than the Apollo moon landings (it's basically the mission flown on Apollo 13, swinging around the moon without going into orbit and then coming back), but it's still something that hasn't been done since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Hopefully more like Apollo 8 than 13!

I understand that SpaceX is not proposing to orbit the moon. Therefore it is more like Apollo 13. Apollo 8 orbited the moon.

Somehow I think the details of flyby vs orbit were not the intended subject I suspect he wants a generally smooth mission like what Apollo 8 and to avoid any unplanned rapid disassembly like what Apollo 13 had.

Good point cswilly, I didn't think of that part! And yeah, I meant let's try and not explode stuff too much...

Hurray for progress! We're able to repeat what was done in 1972!

For a fraction of the cost.

Being the first to land on the moon was never intended to be cheap. So many things had to be invented simply to get there.

Just imagine how economical space flight would be if all of that 1960s technology had been incrementally improved on for efficiency, manufacturing ease, and scale instead of a lot of it being almost literallly mothballed.

There was never any reason to spend that kind of money. It was worth going to the moon once to see what was there, but I have yet to see anybody articulate a reason to go back that doesn't rely on soaring rhetoric and implausible money-making schemes.

Rare-earth mineral security?

Rare-earth means low concentrations. There is still a lot of this stuff in the darts crust an it's not destroyed with use.

Rare-earth minerals aren't actually rare. The name comes from the relatively low concentrations in which you find them naturally. But we won't run out; they're just more expensive to refine as we tap lower concentration sources. Even poor sources are going to yeild minerals at a cost that's a few orders of magnitude less than a what you'd get on the moon.

Yeah, why did they build computers so big and expensive and slow in the WWII? They could have waited for a Skylake Intel, and it would be not only better, but also cheaper...

Except today it will be done at less than 1/10th the cost. So yeah, progress.

If it will be done. Musk isn't great at the "deliver" part, not to mention how dangerous this mission is.

Musk sends partially re-usable rockets into space for a few years now. A decade ago, all he had were some fancy powerpoint slides.

We sure have different definitions of "delivering".

We're still not 100% that they're reusable in a meaningful way that actually reduces costs. The landings are awesome but if it costs too much to reuse them it's more a stunt than anything because as good as it is to not just chunk that hunk of metal in the ocean every launch if it's cheaper that's how it'll be done.

It's a lot easier to go from a stage that lands to one that has to be ditched than the opposite. Worst case, Musk has the same tech that the rest of the world does, although to me it's clear he has quite an advantage.

Oh yeah and personally I think that it's going to work but it hasn't been actually shown that it's cheaper and that the rockets can safely be reused. And that really won't be well shown until multiple reused rockets have been launched.

An interesting outcome is that SpaceX has been able to analyze the rockets post-landing so that they can learn more about the stresses on the rocket during launch. Of course they have to in order to re-launch the rockets, but this is already a capability that no other space agency has had. This ability could end up paying for itself if it means they can feed the knowledge of the rocket back into the design and launch of a new rocket.

Actually, we're pretty sure (based on what SpaceX has announced) that the engines can be reused, and they're a reasonable % of the booster cost.

He's pretty good at the "deliver" part, where he has trouble is "on time."

Space is dangerous. That comes with the territory. I would be very surprised if this ended up being more dangerous than Apollo 8 just given the advances in materials and electronics.

Hurray for reproducability - we can still do what was last done in 1972 - this is something which eludes most scientists!

Look at F1 in 1972 and F1 in 2017 for an example of what relentless, continuous improvement looks like. Can you imagine what would be like if they'd given up on the series? If all that we had was NASCAR and Indy? The entire automotive industry would be over a decade behind, if not more. Most thigns people take for granted like ABS and traction control might not even exist.

Look at SpaceX as an example of what happens when someone fumbles the ball so hard it takes over four decades to recover it. Virtually nothing happened in that time other than the shuttle program, and that was never intended for travel outside of Earth orbit.

Now we're finally back to innovating and engineering for actual space travel.

We did send plenty of robot missions that wouldn't have been possible in the seventies and produced very valuable science. Rosetta and Curiosity for example are very cool missions.

Consider these very cool missions are about 1/10th of the number of missions America was in a position to do.

Consider an America with the Texas Collider operational where major discoveries were made a decade before the CERN one even existed.

Consider an America where the ARPA internet project could have been one of the least notable breakthroughs in the last thirty years.

It's actually a good analogy. The F1 Cars (equals Apollo CSM vs. Crew Dragon 2) have much improved since the 70s, but the Tracks haven't changed and Silverstone is still Silverstone (and the Moon is still where we expect it should be) so the mission parameters are much the same too; you go round and round seventy-odd times (or, once) and come home.

Which is also the record for Farthest Humans From Earth. Any chance they can pass up the chance to break that record?

Yep, they plan to go as far as 400.000 miles from earth, that's quite a bit farther out than Apollo astronauts ever went (less than 300.000 miles).

Well, it says in the article:

"Once operational Crew Dragon missions are underway for NASA, SpaceX will launch the private mission on a journey to circumnavigate the moon and return to Earth."

I don't know why people are arguing over whether they are landing or not...

because no one read the article :)

I certainly hope they allow permission for any emergency landings required at Clavius...could create a bit of a diplomatic row if not.

Nasty flu this time of year, or so I've heard.

>> For so long it was only countries that could do something like that, now it is nearly within reach of individuals.

And that is something we all need to think long and hard about. Sure, spaceflight is cheaper these days, but we also live in an age of extraordinarily concentrated wealth. The necessary implication of individuals with power enough to rival governments is that, well, they can rival governments.

Anyone else see that giant superyacht in london? The one that used HMS Belfast as a dock. Some really do have toys to rival governments.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/nintchdb...

I think you have to do a lot of squinting to see things this way. The vast majority of the funding for SpaceX has come from a government.

The necessary implication of individuals with power enough to rival governments is that, well, they can rival governments.

Do you think this is a bad thing? Personally I quite like the idea of having enough wealth / power to rival a nation-state, since I trust the average nation-state exactly as far as I can throw it.

An elected government, at least i theory, is tasked with doing good by its people. That isnt always true, but at least there are elections. An individual person suffers no such limitation. That can act purely in thier own interest without even a tueoretical check. If they want to ride a rocket to the moon, while children on earth starve, there is absoluely nothing we poor can do about it.

Assuming their wealth was acquired legally, why do you think you should be able to "do something about it"? Wouldn't that require initiation of force, or threat of same? From where would you derive the authority to deprive someone of the legally acquired property?

That isnt always true, but at least there are elections.

The last of which got us Donald Freaking Trump, Jeff Sessions, Kellyanne Conway, and the other Stooges.

Progressive taxation in life, inheritance taxes in death. The economy wouldn't collapse if there were fewer people with billions and a lot more people with retirement accounts and proper health care. It worked well enough in the 50s and 60s that we could afford apollo.

There is the possibility that the wealth of an individual was acquired through voluntary trade. In that case, the person has already done so much good for other people that asking them for philanthropy instead of self-indulgence is renegotiating a deal that has already closed.

In contrast, most governments have acquired massive wealth through taxation of their subjects. Those subjects are less likely to tolerate the burden of taxation without some form of reciprocal obligation by the government, such as the expectation they will feed starving children, or provide for common defense, or ensure the viability of comprehensive health care systems.

The feat of the self-made ultrawealthy individual is magnified by the possibility that they have also paid taxes while accumulating their wealth.

In the case of Musk, he appears to have earned his fortune via normal entrepreneurship and standard business practices. He has contributed to giving us Internet payment services, private orbital launch, electric cars, solar energy production, and a few other things that (presumably) enough people want to make a business of them. The theoretical check on the serial entrepreneur that has achieved escape velocity from the rat race in both figurative and literal senses is starting a new business from old exit money that eventually fails hard.

I don't want Musk to feed starving children on Earth. I want him to feed children on Mars. If he can do that, I will likely throw fistfuls of my money at his face without him having to wave a gun in mine.

But he does seem to be a rather rare breed. Many ultrawealthy people did not accumulate their wealth by fulfilling the wishes of others. If you compare the likes of Musk, Gates, and Buffett with corrupt heads of state (i.e. Vladimir Putin) and monarchs, where the personal wealth is siphoned off from government funds, those are the people who most need some form of theoretical check. Those two classes don't need to be held to the same standard, because there is a vast gulf separating wealth that was earned from wealth that was taken.

Nobody can make billions through work. There are no billion-dollar medical doctors or even lawyers. Billions can only come through passive income, through owning shares of a growing company rather than hard graft.

I consider working in a leadership role, for a company you have a significant share of ownership in, to be active income.

There are billion-dollar founder-managers. There are billion-dollar investor-board members. People like Carl Icahn blur a bit of the line between passive and active income, but changing the direction of a company via votes and proxies is work, too. Even managing a hedge fund involves some work, as it involves calculating alpha, beta, and correlation rather than direct management of one company, but that's applying a lot of information-leverage to a little bit of work, and I consider that to be mostly passive income. The work itself is worth maybe $100k to $500k/year for the financial analysis, and any excess is passively gathered as dividends from the portfolio companies and as fees from the fund's investors.

It isn't a binary "good rich" and "bad rich". There is a continuous spectrum from not a dime that wasn't earned to not a dime that was. The tech company tycoons fall mostly on one end of that, and the Saudi princes fall mostly on the other.

I think that as a gross generalization, those who have had to earn some of their wealth have a greater right to spend what they have as they please, without consideration for societal expectations. There's no noblesse oblige for the person who does not passively benefit from the collection of the taxes.

But if you're a wealthy monarch, or a trust fund baby, you had damned well better think of the children before you try to go to space.

> there isn't anything about a privately funded and established outpost that wants to declare independence

Practically speaking, there isn't anything the UN can do if America sticks a base on Mars and calls it sovereign soil. We've already started legalising private ownership of celestial bodies through the SPACE Act, in direct contravention of the Outer Space Treaty.

But practically speaking there's also not much the US can do in that scenario if Russia or China ignores US sovereignty over Mars and sets up their own base. The US's only recourse would be to start a war, and would that be worth it? Sovereignty is more of a practical concept than a legal one: you own what you are both able and willing to defend.

See also the Russian bases in the Australian Antarctic territory. Australia asserts sovereignty over a third of Antarctica, Russia ignores it and sets up bases anyway. Australia has neither the ability nor the desire to fight Russia, so we studiously ignore it.

Australia definitely has the ability to prevent Russia from setting up bases in Antarctica. It more like that they don't intend to do that because all their claims of sovereignty over Antarctica is a joke.

The Outer Space Treaty was only meant to prevent governments from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. The SPACE Act echoes that:

>It is the sense of Congress that by the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body

This is great, but let's have some perspective, please. SpaceX is the beneficiary of decades of research in engineering and basic science by the US government. They aren't making this achievement as a result of their own original effort or even funding (NASA provided a significant portion of the funding).

I don't think it is fair to compare the SpaceX plan with China's (who have almost certainly had to acquire the expertise from a starting position far, far behind where SpaceX started).

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say.

China was the beneficiary of decades of Soviet research into space as well, their early program flew Soyuz craft, their current craft maintain backwards compatibility if what is available is to be believed. They have a space station and put a rover on the Moon. So how is that an unfair comparison?

And how does using existing research take away from anything SpaceX has done? Sure NASA bought missions from them before they were sure that they could deliver, that sort of seed funding is not uncommon. Blue Origin benefited from a wealth of data in the DC-X project, also funded by NASA but its still remarkable what that they took Newshepard up and down from space four times.

I disagree that the Chinese started from scratch. From where I am sitting they started at the exact same place SpaceX did, using the research and know-how from a well funded and storied space organization to bootstrap their goals.

> I disagree that the Chinese started from scratch. From where I am sitting they started at the exact same place SpaceX did, using the research and know-how from a well funded and storied space organization to bootstrap their goals.

We can count it different ways. Besides having millenias long history of rocketry, China modern space program started with von Karman student:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen

But let's have some perspective, please. NASA was the beneficiary of years of research in engineering and basic science by the German government. They didn't make anything as a result of their own original effort.

So what? Nobody reinvents the wheel if they don't have to.

And I don't know why you think China started behind SpaceX. China benefited from US technical assistance in a way that SpaceX didn't.

>Dragon has the deltaV to land on the moon (not sure if it has enough to get off again though) and SpaceX certainly has the expertise in building spacecraft that land.

Not if you count de-orbiting as part of landing it doesn't. It has something like 300m/s dV. Landing would take 2000ish, and that just gets you down.

How will Elon get us to the moon if Tesla is burning up all of his money? [1]

Also a private entity can't assert jurisdiction over anything, you have to be a state to do just that.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/tesla-slu...

Downvotes? Ah, i forgot that around here one is not supposed to question anything that Elon does.

An analyst downgrades Tesla, and shares lost ~5% of their value == Tesla burning up money? A delay in production? That's your argument? All of these articles are complete, and proven bullst.

'Burning cash' 'unproven business model' 'problems with execution' also they switched several senior managers recently.

> All this time I imagined that some country would establish a base there, and grudgingly offer up some space for non-state use, and now there is this possibility of a private facility that states have to ask permission to visit? That is priceless.

That is scary, and dangerous, more like.

I've always held the following questions about space, and moon - in-specific - exploration:

* Why are we not placing a DNA/Seed-vault on the moon

* Why are we not depositing resources on the moon

* Why dont we plan, plant, place autonomous robotic pods on the moon that can be called down/up carrying various resources

* what happens to the moon if we transfer water/create water on the moon

* Why cant this be a global effort, in the sense that we are talking about colonizing/visiting mars, but we can't even colonize the moon? What/Who is blocking this effort?

* Why aren't we actually practicing mars colonization on the moon first???

---

There are so many questions that I have about moon colonization/exploration that are so flippantly replied to as cost...

It feeds my tinfoil: there are things on the moon they dont want us to see??? (I know, just as flippant - but c'mon humanity, get your shit together and put some known colonies on the freaking moon!)

> Why are we not placing a DNA/Seed-vault on the moon

Because it's expensive to get it there, useless on the moon, and expensive to get it somewhere useful in the event of need, all because of gravity wells.

> Why are we not depositing resources on the moon

Same answer.

> Why dont we plan, plant, place autonomous robotic pods on the moon that can be called down/up carrying various resources

And, again, same answer, both for the pods and the resources themselves.

> what happens to the moon if we transfer water/create water on the moon

It boils off and leaves, possibly after freezing for a while, depending on the time of lunar day you deposit the water, IIRC.

> Why cant this be a global effort

Because a really bad idea doesn't get better because more people are involved.

> Why aren't we actually practicing mars colonization on the moon first?

Because the Moon isn't very much like Mars in ways relevant to colonization, so there is no value to doing that. While perhaps some relevant technologies might benefit from the shorter feedback cycles of Earth-Moon missions for refinement, the costs of such missions are close enough to Earth-Mars missions that it's generally not worth it to go to the Moon if your goal is Mars. Just go to Mars.

To the DNA/Seed Vault question, I heard a really interesting point of view expressed which resonated with me. It was this, "Why not create a mechanism to record all of our knowledge and information so that if an extinction level event occurs we can come back from the brink?" And the answer was "If we allow ourselves to become nearly extinct, especially through our own action or inaction, isn't is more reasonable to let what ever comes after us to have a fresh start?"

Can you imagine if all of a sudden, out of the ground a bunch of Dinosaur scientists emerged having kept themselves in cryo-suspension with all of their dinosaur tech to reestablish themselves as the dominant species on the planet? Are they going to be conflicted? Do they just eradicate humans because they were first? I'm sure Charlie Stross could make up a good story along those lines. I'd read it for sure :-)

But the meta question, the big one behind all those "Why"s up there, is well understood. As a planet, and certainly as a nation, and even on as small a scale as a city, we are divided in our understanding of the reasoning for why being a multiplanet species might be more important than say, feeding the starving in Sudan.

You can have a room of 100,000 people shouting in unison to colonize Mars and that is an insignificant fraction of the people who would have to be aligned to make that the generally agreed upon plan.

And that is one of the things that makes this announcement so amazing to me. When we achieve that moment where a small enough group of individuals can effect a legitimate colonization effort, then it can happen without consensus of a nation-state and can proceed based on the self interest of a much smaller group. And while it is a staple in science fiction that corporations have fleets of space craft they use to achieve their interplanetary goals like an inter-solar Dutch East India company, I never expected it to be possible for a company to be able to do that in my lifetime.

It is very likely Steve Jurveston.

1. In a comment about the announcement alluded to it as a "recurring dream"[1]

2. 5 years ago, described a moon orbit as "when I plan to fly in space. I have two specific missions in mind"[2]

3. SpaceX Board Member and investor

4. Has the money

5. Knows Elon "Mr Musk declined to reveal their identities, only saying that they knew each other"[3]

6. Is "nobody from Hollywood"

7. Liked this comment on his FB wall "Can I tag along?!? Ahhhhh!!!"[4]

[1]https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/23226164619

[2]https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/7659357718

[3]http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39111030

[4]https://www.facebook.com/jurvetson/posts/10158310863860611?c...

5) According to another source, he did not say that he knew any of them, but rather that the two passengers knew each other.

Source: http://spaceflightnow.com/2017/02/27/spacex-to-send-two-priv...

can you provide the exact quote from the article that indicates that musk does not know the two passengers? i read through the article twice and cannot seem to find it. perhaps the publication removed a sentence?

In this photo from 2012, he's inside the Shuttle White Room at the end of the Swing Arm on Pad 39A: https://flic.kr/p/bzh1Ju

> 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 :)

Maybe Richard Garriot wants to survey his property (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garriott#Other_accompl...) from near-lunar orbit. ;)

"Not me... yet!"

https://twitter.com/RichardGarriott/status/83632784187673804...

interestingly his wife was president of a (now failed) space tech company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Dynamics

Same! I also think that spending money on a roundtrip to the moon is way better for humanity than spending it on champagne, caviar and cars.

Not sure everyone will see it that way. One could look at it as taking the whole "wasteful private jet" to the extreme. Think of the sheer amount of fuel burned in the earth's atmosphere so a rich guy can fly in space.

At least, I expect many will spin it that way.

Isn't the exhaust just water?!?

Not with the fuels used by the Falcon rockets. They use LOX + RP1 (kerosene), rather than LOX + LH (which does produce water).

Not for the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy that will be used in this launch; it uses RP-1 (basically very pure jet fuel, AKA kerosene) and liquid oxygen as fuel.

The Shuttle and the new Space Launch System will use hydrogen/LOX, which exhausts basically water vapor.

Well, not the SRB part.

Yeah, in both cases, the SRBs are the majority of the launch thrust.

RP-1/LOX also exhausts basically water vapor, plus CO2. There should be little NOx emission since it's not burning air, but there's probably some organic emissions from unburned fuel.

Is it? I know very little about rocket fuel, but I always assumed that CO2 is involved. A short bit of Googling "composition of rocket fuel exhaust" wasn't immediately helpful. :/

Other responses go into this in more detail, but basically there are a few very chemically different types of rocket fuel. Usually for main engines these are bipropellants, with a fuel component and an oxidizer component.

The expensive, exotic, high-specific-impulse, but low-density and dangerous option is liquid hydrogen + liquid oxygen (hydrolox), which does indeed create water vapor as exhaust. This particular rocket, however, uses RP-1 (similar to jet fuel - just highly refined kerosene) + liquid oxygen - still burning hydrocarbons, still releasing CO2, but favored because it's cheap, dense, safe, and doesn't need cryogenic cooling.

For comparison, the ITS (and many other Mars mission concepts) use liquid methane + liquid oxygen (methalox), which also outputs CO2, needs cryogenic cooling and is not as safe or dense as RP-1/LOX, but is still safer and denser than hydrogen, doesn't need to be kept quite as cold, and is easy to synthesize on-site on another planet.

And then there are the more out-there toxic ones like hydrazine and whatever fuel they use with oxidizers like nitric acid and the chloroflourines.

Just look at the composition of the rocket fuel, and add oxygen to that. It the fuel has lots of carbon atoms in it, CO2 will be the result in the same proportion.

Mostly CO2 and CO, see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP-1

The H in hydrocarbons mostly ends up as water, so ideally it's about 50/50 H2O + CO2. But, you do get a little bit other stuff.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene The combustion reaction can be approximated as follows, with the molecular formula C12H26 (dodecane):

2 C12H26(l) + 37 O2(g) → 24 CO2(g) + 26 H2O(g); ∆H˚ = -7513 kJ

It's about 50/50 by moles, but one mole of CO2 masses 44/18th = 2.44x as much as one mole of water.

The atomic makeup of RP-1 is about CH1.97[1], so at stoichiometric ratio[2] that would yield 71.3% CO2 and 28.7% H2O by mass.

[1] http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/propulsion...

[2] in reality Falcon 9 burns fuel-rich

As an interesting bit of trivia: the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere? Water vapor.

Which doesn't mean that emitting water vapor from a rocket adds to global warming. It just adds to the rain.

True as long as you intend to fly your rocket within the troposphere, the lower ~10 miles of the atmosphere. Above that, water vapor seems to stick around a long time and is currently understood to be quite harmful[1]. This is also an issue with high-flying planes (not that flying low is better, due to the decreased efficiency). However, more research is needed[2].

[1] http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate... (kind of old, but I think the more recent IPCC reports are in a similar vein)

[2] https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-forgotten-water-vapo...

Wow, learn something new every day. Thanks!

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 space for leisure.

Even in the ideal case (inert gas, no anthrax rocket, the first stage duly recycled), the energy usage would remain as a consideration.

You may have a point regarding the public perception; don't really care to weigh in.

Water is a greenhouse gas too.

> the moral issue

Uhh, what moral issue, exactly?

Or you can look at it like someone is bankrolling a significant trial of several potentially species saving technologies. (I understand you're playing the devil's advocate, just trying a response)

The flight is a necessary step toward viable interplanetary travel. Even NASA slung people around the Moon before later flights landed thereon. Gotta send a rocket up & around & back, with passengers, to make progress toward the "colony on Mars" goal, so may as well do it with someone willing to fund a good chunk of the excursion.

I actually think today we'd be in a better situation if NASA had stopped there and didn't land on the moon (in the 1960s). Here's my reasoning:

(1) It's much easier to orbit the moon than to land on it.

(2) Both the US and the USSR had the capability to send many people on orbital flights around the moon.

(3) With both the US and USSR orbiting the moon, the space race wouldn't have ended (because both had the same capability and neither had put a flag on the surface).

(4) Once both countries are orbiting the moon for a few years, at some point in the 1970s one or the other would have made a landing.

(5) Both great powers would be competing incrementally in the same space, but at the same time it's not a situation which could have plausibly lead to a war, so it would have been safe for humanity.

1) It is much easier to stay on Earth than to got into space

2) All the nations have a capability to stay on Earth

…

Interestingly, the Falcon Heavy has similar fuel capacity to a 747.

(plus or minus)

Well, 215,000 L for the 747, 175,000 L for a Falcon 9, and 470,000 for the Falcon Heavy so in the same rough range. The Falcon Heavy is also carrying another 780,000 L of oxygen but that doesn't contribute any extra carbon, of course.

That is a really surprising comparison, thanks for pointing it out! Do you have a source for that, it is something I expect to be repeating.

I agree. For some reason I imagined that orbital-capable rockets use order(s) of magnitude more fuel than airliners...

Depending on how you count, it does. The 747-8 freighter can carry 240k L of fuel [1], and 308k lbs of cargo [2], so 1.3 L/lb. The Falcon Heavy can launch 120k lbs of cargo into low-Earth orbit [3], and according to the grandparent, is carrying 1250k L of fuel (including oxygen, which is an essential component of "fuel" in this case), so 10.4 L/lb. Still, that's better than I expected. And if you want to go to Mars, you can take 30k lbs, so 41.7 L/lb, for only 4X LEO, quite the bargain!

(Interestingly, the average cost of a 10 hr 747 flight is about $40k [about $14k for fuel, which is about 33% of costs], compared to $90m [estimated] for a Falcon Heavy launch. So one order of magnitude more fuel, but almost 4 orders of magnitude more price.)

[1] https://www.reference.com/vehicles/much-747-weigh-8b0c48a1d8... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-8 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [4] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-a-Boeing-747-or-777... [5] https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-the-cost-of-an-airline-tic...

Would it be erreneous to say that no matter how 'green' our industries and power consumption on ground becomes, aviation and space flight would always require carbon based fuel?

An electric plane could be a possibility, depending on advancements in battery technology or power storage in general. Space flight would most likely require some kind fuel, at least in our lifetimes - so far we haven't found any other way to move mass in vacuum other than expelling propellant.

However, not all rocket fuel/propellant is carbon based, in fact, most aren't.

We may be able to develop better electricity storage to allow electric planes to be more practical than they currently are.

However, there's also a lot of interest in using biofuels for aviation, so you may see that in the mid-term future we're using carbon-based fuels but they're largely carbon-neutral.

If we can make renewable energy cheap enough it'll start making economic sense to synthesize fuel oil out of the air and water rather than mining it out of the ground, leading to no net carbon consumption.

> I also think that spending money on a roundtrip to the moon is way better for humanity than spending it on champagne, caviar and cars.

How? I'm not saying you're wrong, but gut instinct is that automobiles are more useful to humans. I'd like to hear your thought process.

Fair question. In short: Unless you're buying Tesla your car expenditures won't fund any significant research into improving cars in a way that benefits humankind.

[citation needed]

I'm happy to be corrected if you know more.

You're the one that made the claim, it not up to the rest of us to post links refuting it.

Yes, i made the claim, however i don't stand by it. I was challenged, realized my knowledge may not be up to snuff and asked that someone more knowledgable than me be nice enough to share, and i meant that earnestly. I'm not interested in winning contests, i just want to have good knowledge.

clock_tower did so here, very excellently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749603

A Lexus would do much of the same; Toyota's already got plug-in hybrids, and is working on hydrogen fuel cells.

(As for the other expenditures proposed above: real AOC Champagne supports the vineyards and traditional practices of the Champagne province of France; caviar... supports sturgeon fishermen? But consuming both together is just conspicuous consumption -- Champagne is a dessert wine. :) )

Thanks for the correction. Buy Toyotas then, folks, if you can't afford Teslas. :D

Already there. :)

I believe the technology that will benefit humanity significantly is in the batteries.

That's why we need battery-powered rockets.

http://bart.volgers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dilbert-El...

Battery powered rocket, here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket)

The key phrase in this statement is "for humanity", not "for an individual".

Automobiles, while useful, are mostly a solved technology (unless you're buying Tesla or some other prototype, pushing-the-envelope model). Buying another one - or for that matter, making another typical automobile - has negligible marginal impact on advancement of technology. Taking humans to the Moon again - first time in 45 years - will have a huge impact both on our technological capacity as a species[0] and on the public's willingness to pursue those advancements.

Also, spaceflight is an immature area of knowledge, so one could argue that in general, each dollar put in it has more marginal benefit than the same dollar put into buying typical consumer goods.

[0] - Which is arguably not ever-increasing; we've pretty much lost the manned deep spaceflight capabilities with the end of Apollo program. There are practical details we need to rediscover, and those details will be important in efforts to put humans on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System.

Probably not them, but it made me think of these two... https://story.californiasunday.com/mars-madness

What if it's Larry Ellison and Travis Kalanick?

At least it'll be nice to have them off the planet for a couple of weeks.

Can we not let them back? Make up claims about space rabies or something?

It could be Elon.

Hopefully it isn't. In the event that something goes wrong, we need him here.

Nah, if Elon is going somewhere, it's deeper underground with his giant bore.

I was thinking the same. Relevant xkcd https://what-if.xkcd.com/124/

I suspect Elon is saving himself for his Mars mission in 2031.

James Cameron? He seems to have a penchant for this stuff.

> Can't wait to hear who booked this trip! Definitely one of the coolest ways to spend a lot of superfluous money :)

Imagine it ends up being some celebrity, like Leonardo di Caprio (who has shown interest in space IIRC) or Lady Gaga. Don't you think it would somehow tarnish the whole thing?

Why would a figure with so much PR fire power tarnish it? If anything it would put space exploration front and center for so many young and adolescence people.

Even if it was Justin Bieber? Instead of "One small step for the man...", we'd have Justin singing "baby, baby, baby..." to promote his latest album.

I'd rather it not be Justin Bieber.

Either the rocket would blow up on the pad or it would never come back. ;)

I think the image that is being tarnished here is yours... Imagine we aren't told who the astronauts are until a long time after the mission (the photos and video have their faces redacted or something) would the revelation that one of them was Mr Bieber really make it suddenly less of an achievement or 'tarnish' it?

Not Leonardo di Caprio, he will stay behind even though there is enough room for two people on that return vehicle.

Also, hopefully not Matt Damon.

But if it's Matt Damon, there's bound to be a much bigger mission to go rescue him, so, more progress.

It would be cooler if they donated it for sending more robots to Mars...

More practical, science-wise? Yes. Cooler? Definitely not.

Sending humans to space has a very important non-scientific factor - human emotions and imagination. It's an important driving force that's also necessary until we bootstrap a proper profitable market that'll do the driving.

About 20 years ago as a young engineer I was given the opportunity to propose some solutions to NASA, and was invited to the Kennedy Space Center’s LCC for the presentation. Prior to meeting with the exec team at the LCC they took me on a tour of the VAB, where I saw all the operations and was allowed to take digital images of some of the vehicle assembly and maintenance operations to demonstrate possible improvements. Such great energy at the whole KSC. What an honor to be there to feel that passion and gratitude!

Last month I was again at the KSC and LCC as a tourist, and the energy was just a minute fraction of what I'd seen 20 years before. We need this kind of vision [from SpaceX and others, e.g., like this other NASA-based article today with the young engineer comments, who did the hydroponics in microgravity at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13743196 ] to push science and technology beyond the video game and entertainment markets. Congratulations to SpaceX, the microgravity hydroponics engineer, and the others with vision who are once-again elevating the bright eyes of brilliant youth, scientists and engineers.

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 flight beyond the moon will be a fantastic proving ground, however.

> That's an incredibly aggressive timeline

Sometimes i wonder if that's an strategy from the management team to put pressure in the engineers.

It seems like a carrot and a stick because it also reinforces the "SpaceX is special" narrative.

In the same way that hitting a stuck bolt with a hammer is a strategy. It applies pressure sure, but you break your tools and the nut gets stripped.

It seems to a preferred motivation method though.

It worked before. Kennedy's moon shot speech was 8 years and 2 months before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The speech was made before the US had put a person in orbit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T1ztqhYQ7g

It definitely works, and you might argue that when it comes to forwarding humanity, then what of a few exhausted engineers! But in other contexts perhaps not an elegant methodology.

Of course, that time around it lead to the Apollo 1 fire killing the first crew in on-the-ground testing before they even got as far as trying to launch them into Earth orbit. Probably not something to be looked up to.

I would bet that the astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs thought there would be more than one fatal spacecraft failure by the end of Apollo. A number of astronauts (who never got to space) also died during training (in aircraft crashes in other incidents).

It's a reach to suggest that the pressure to get to the moon directly caused the Apollo 1 fire. There's no evidence that the engineering decisions that led to the fire or the poor escape hatch design would have been avoided with a longer timeline, many of them were choices made in reaction to near death experiences for previous accidents - in particular, both the choice of pure oxygen and the hatch design.

> Sometimes i wonder if that's an strategy from the management team to put pressure in the engineers.

Or simply a way to generate press and attention, including on Hacker News.

The get attention because the incredible things they already do. If they were some random company that had not done much nobody would care. However with SpaceX its actually reasonable to believe that they will actually do it in the next couple years.

That's always the case, in my experience.

This must be taught in business schools somewhere.

Probably... the Falcon Heavy rocket has been "only a year from its first launch" for about 6 years. That said, I think they're probably correct about it now

They've already had Dragon flights where they've said "if there were humans aboard, they'd have been just fine", i.e. the Dragon's life-support capabilities have been tested.

You don't have to have flown humans to test whether you can fly humans, you know you were able to maintain a breathable atmosphere, and you know you have enough fuel to launch a few hundred kilos of meatbags, food & water.

Note also that SpaceX is going to start flying cargo in a derived-from-Crew-Dragon Dragon, so they'll have more experience with the changes in Crew Dragon, and can practice propulsive landings on Earth for cargo before trying it for crew.

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.

Also the moon is pretty boring and Elon Musk likes exciting things.

Making an automobile that people actually want to buy would be exciting.

There were how many $1000 deposits on Model 3s?

How I wish I could experience the boredom of flying around the Moon.

"Relatively" being very much a keyword here. Nothing about sending two people around the moon is easy, there's a reason it hasn't been done in several decades.

>there's a reason it hasn't been done in several decades

Because it lost its novelty. Clearly the technology's already been there and had the potential to get better with continued funding.

Apollo 11 was a huge moment for the US and the world. We beat the Soviet Union to the moon, and that was the primary goal. By the time Apollo 17 rolled around there were other things going on that grabbed our attention (like Vietnam). We had already spent too much money on the Apollo program and the public didn't really care anymore, so it ended.

I disagree about the "quick buck"

The surprising thing about this announcement is that its a private mission. SpaceX has long resisted private tourism, to pursue CRS and Commercial Crew missions. I'm sure several billionaires would have written a large check, long ago, to go into orbit.

Have they really resisted it? SpaceX haven't had, and still don't have, a spacecraft capable of carrying people into orbit, so it's not like they've left money on the table. Delivering satellites and cargo was a good way to fund and prove the rocket themselves, without which any tourism is obviously a non-starter. And working with NASA on the Commercial Crew programme provides access to NASA expertise and facilities that SpaceX would otherwise have to develop from scratch. I suspect tourism was always part of the long-term plan.

If I had to guess why they decided to start with this mission in particular, I think it is probably because it provides a better PR opportunity than simple orbital tourism. SpaceX are clearly very image conscious, and beginning by taxiing billionaires into orbit perhaps sends the wrong signal. It's not doing anything that Russia hasn't already done, and undercuts the idealistic image they put across.

On the other hand, sending people beyond LEO for the first time in over forty years is clearly a major accomplishment. And having them be private citizens, even very rich ones, sends a very strong message that private spaceflight has come of age.

Indeed, the last time people went beyond LEO was Apollo 17 in 1972. Having the capability to do so is a big step towards re-attaining the Apollo level of humans in space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17

Yes, SpaceX resisted earlier tourism opportunities for a few reasons. One reason was they didn't have the corporate resources to do tourism flights, and do the R&D for CCDev & Commercial Crew Program (CCP), so they focused on Commercial Crew.

Another reason is that NASA doesn't want tourist flights to the ISS, and no private destinations were close to ready. Lets say CCP funding was delayed, and a private team offered $400m for tourist flights, they'd have to develop two different Dragon capsule specifications. One for ISS, and one for private tourism. Similar, but with non-identical requirements. With the CCP further along, the different specifications may no longer be an issue.

Another reason is SpaceX doesn't have a training program for space tourists, and they'd require a training program. The Russians require 3-6mo of training for a space tourist on the Soyuz.

That said, there are reasons SpaceX went for this plan now, and not before.

Everyone replying is missing this oppositized JFK quote: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

-JFK

I don't think anyone is missing that, cutesy little jokes like that just don't tend to do well here on HN.

They are viewed as somewhat missing the point, and so aren't enjoyed.

I think possibly lots of people are missing it. How well known is Kennedy's speech for those who weren't alive at the time? And yes it was a joke, but contained within the joke is a pointed commentary.

I think it's one of the most famous quotations in the country (it has it's own wikipedia page[0]), and the reference wasn't exactly subtle. I'm betting most downvoters (myself included) got the reference.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

JFK's moon speech is one of the most famous of all time, especially in the US. Up there with the Gettysburg Address and I Have a Dream.

Sorry, a bit dense maybe, but what's 'oppositized' about it? That looks like a verbatim quote to me.

EDIT: Oh, not your usage! You're suggesting people somehow haven't realised the GP was mis-quoting JFK, I guess? I think it's more likely that everyone reading that GP comment realised, since it was a pretty obvious context for the reference.

The Apollo program also started with around-the-moon missions before the landing missions.

lol love it

JFKa-ching!

they went around the moon before landing on it, too.

Everyone's always so cynical... They're sending (presumably) two non-astronauts further than any humans have ever been. I assume there will be future milestones that probably include landing on the moon to test the Mars landing.

Landing on the moon to "test" the Mars landing makes almost no sense. The a moon is just to different, landing on mars can be trained much better on Earth or on Mars itself.

The simuliertes are not enough to make it sensible if you don't have another reason to land on the moon too.

There's gravity and a rock. Ignoring all the differences these still two extremely hard things to solve first before you start thinking of anything else.

There's gravity and a rock on Earth too. Just going up into orbit, then landing back on Earth, is a much better way of testing a Mars landing.

The Earth has a full atmosphere with winds, an expansive array of magnetic and electric fields, and a much much higher gravitational pull then Mars or the moon. About a factor of 10 removed from mars and about a further factor of 10 removed from the moon.

You'd obviously need more fuel, and fuel that can burn in a completely different atmosphere then it's intended to run in. It's an invalid test for the kind of useful metrics that would be obtainable in a "pure" vacume out in space.

I wonder if there's an altitude you could do a "landing" at that would be thin enough atmosphere and weak enough gravity to get close to Martian conditions.

NASA does indeed use high-altitudes on earth to test Mars aerobraking, atmospheric entry, and supersonic parachute deployment[0]. For the actual terminal descent and landing speeds are low enough the atmosphere is not significant, you can just test that at sea level.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Density_Supersonic_Deceler...

> weak enough gravity

Gravity will still be too high, gravity at the ISS is 0.89 times gravity on the ground and you obviously need to be lower than that. But it's definitely the closest we can get to a large scale martian atmosphere.

Rockets carry oxidizer along with fuel, so the composition of the local atmosphere doesn't really figure. Also, your factors are way off; Martian gravity is a bit shy of 0.4g, and lunar gravity a bit proud of 0.1.

Finally, we don't need to land on the moon, or Earth, or anywhere else, to validate a method of landing on Mars, because we already know how to land on all of those things. We've done it plenty of times before, in all cases; the difference between doing it manned and doing it unmanned is purely one of mass.

We've only landed light things on mars, curiosity is the heaviest at 889kg, and the methods used don't scale easily.

Anything that can sustain humans for an extended period of time is going to weigh a lot more. EDL (Entry descent and landing) is a solvable problem, but it's not a solved one. You can find lots of recent work on it by googling that term.

Not to disagree that we can test on Earth better than the moon. Mars has a light atmosphere, but it doesn't have no atmosphere.

You're wrong about the gravity. The escape velocity of Mars is 5 km/s, half of Earth's and twice the Moon's. The surface gravity is also .4G which is about half the Earth's and two and a half times the Moons. So they're all a lot closer together than you said.

The Moon has no atmosphere to use to shed speed. Very different animal than a Mars landing, to the point where it'd need a totally different landing vehicle than Mars.

Think heavy, shielded Apollo command modules versus the spidery lunar landers.

There's about .7kPa of atmos on mars. I'd have a hard time seeing how that would meaningfully influence escape or entrance velocity. In fact it should make entry easier because you'll have a higher resistance coming in meaning you'll have to do a lower deceleration burn.

Could you provide a source, of someone with experiance in this sort of work, telling me why this is the case? Why does this completely change the game? Why is a moon landing not the eaisiest "we know basically what we're doing"?

You can bounce on the atmo and by passing threw it multible times you can bleed away speed. Then you can fly your capsule like a wing for a bit losing even more speed.

That's why a Dragon 2 can land on Mars, but not on the Moon.

Check out the Scott Manley video on Youtube for lots of details, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zuFdVkVxpM.

http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-...

Money quote: “There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.”

I believe that comment is more or less based on the shuttle landing and/or the soyuz capsules (eg parachutes) - but as far as I can tell, SpaceX is the only one currently capable (and using) propulsive landing on earth - so essentially they've already leapfrogged the grey zone to a large extent.

Makes me wonder whether testing a propulsive landing on an airborne drone barge is feasible? A blimp with a well-insulated large pad on the top - though I'm not sure how you'd effectively anchor it in the air - probably a active propulsion system as well.

Sure, if you ignore all the other problems. Why not fly to the Venus and test there? Why not on Saturn? The reason is simple, the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits of doing so.

Look, its simply almost as expensive to make such a test on the moon, as it is on mars. If mars is your goal, then testing on the moon makes absolutely no sense.

People seem to believe that because the moon is closer, it means its much easier there. The reality is that the deltaV is not that different, plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.

OTOH, if you are "rapidly" (insofar as that is possible in space technology) iterating on some aspect of the system that is relatively insensitive to the differences between the Moon and Mars, the Moon being closer shortens your cycle time considerably. Delta-V isn't the only cost you might be concerned with.

True, but nobody has the money to develop something that needs multible moon test mission before it ever gets used productively.

Also, SpaceX has actually thought about the problem quite a bit and until somebody payed them they clearly said they are not going to do anything moon related.

They clearly did the same calculations. Moon is only worth it, if you actually want to go to the moon.

> True, but nobody has the money to develop something that needs multible moon test mission before it ever gets used productively.

No one would be willing to fund anything that hasn't gone through at least one viability test on the closest short term analogous scale.

You can repeat that as often as you want, that does not make it true.

SpaceX clearly did not think that for their mars architecture needed a moon testing step. Mars concepts such as Mars Direct did not include such a step.

Unless you have extreme time pressure its much, much, much preferable to test on Earth and Mars, rather then the Moon. Earth because it's by far the cheapest, and it shares a reasonable amount with Mars, and Mars because that's where you want to go anyway.

The only advantage that the moon has is that it is closer than mars in pure distance. That advantage is eradicated when you consider the much more important DeltaV.

Isn't Earth closer to Mars half a (lunar) month ?

No. The Moon is in orbit around the Earth and both the Earth and Mars are in orbit around the sun. The Moon varies between 360,000 and 400,000 km away and the closest Mars gets to us is 54,600,000 kilometers. Those numbers are a bit of an exaggeration because how much fuel you need is just as important as absolute distance/time to travel and for that you need 4 km/s of delta-v to get from Earth orbit to Moon orbit and 5.7 km/s to get to Mars orbit.

I meant that the Earth is closer to Mars than the Moon is, not that Mars is closer to Earth than the Moon is (of course it isn't, that would make for a big, big blood moon)

Oh, in that case then the relevant metric is probably delta-v in which case the Moon is always a lot closer to Mars than th Earth is. See here:

http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png

The difference between a human-cargo test run of days vs months/years is substantial.

Exactly and that's not mentioning the benifit of being able to easily recover a failed prototype or even just analysis of a failed prototype.

Imagine trying to diagnose a problem that comes up 10 months into the program after the probe is no longer in a direct visual path or while communications via microwaves start taking 10-20 seconds from point to point.

There are too many questions to be answered before we can just say "you know while we're at it lets just risk the lives of 10-20 people, who cares right?"

On the other hand, 10-20 people in a bus out of control on a mountainside can get in the news, even if it ends in tragedy. But we don't color our whole view of auto travel because of it. We don't make policy or even many business decisions because of it.

Space travel can be dangerous. We will likely lose some crews. Rescue will always be too far away to matter. But I think folks will do it anyway.

Of course they will.

  Say to me, "There's too much danger."
  Say we could be lost,
  And I reply, "I'm no stranger
  To danger. That's the cost."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oet1j9EA2fs&index=10&list=PL...

(Incidentally, this lovely song is a good answer to a lot of comments on this story.)

I don't understand why the human cost of space travel is always weighted so heavily. All exploration costs lives.

How many died conquering America? Exploring the poles? The Everest?

To this day people die in the Everest. It's their choice to risk their lives in such a way. Yet I don't hear people saying "don't go there".

Space is riskier, but also has more rewards.

Yeah lots of volunteers could be found for a one-way to Mars.

> plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.

Actually Mars is a pretty difficult place to land. The atmosphere is just thick enough to require heavy heat shields, but too thin for parachutes to be sufficient.

Here's a Wired article that talks about some of the issues - https://www.wired.com/2011/11/landing-on-mars/

Still, you can get rid of most of the velocity for a Mars landing using aerobraking alone. To land on the Moon you'll be bringing all of that delta-V with you as fuel. Landing a Dragon on Mars already takes a lot of propellant: https://youtu.be/ZoSKHzziLKw

Even if Mars's atmosphere only kills 90% of your orbital velocity instead of the 99% you'd get on Earth[1] you're still saving a humongous amount of fuel, far more than the mass of the heat shield you have to carry along. If you're designing a new heat shield for each mission then the added complexity might make that not worth while but SpaceX is reusing the same heat shield design they've been testing on Earth so that isn't a concern.

[1] numbers vague guesses

Have they said they'll test Martian equipment with Lunar landings? I'd guess it'd make a pretty poor testing ground, considering the cost of getting there.

Lunar landing is harder in many ways than a Martian landing. Without an atmosphere, you cannot aerobrake.

That's a coin with a flipside though: you also don't need much in terms of heatshields so in that sense it is easier than on Mars.

A Mars landing needs both heatshields (because it does have an atmosphere) and retro-rockets to land with (because that atmosphere is not so dense that you can use it for gliding).

Well, they haven't got a lander for one thing. The Apollo LM had its design finalised in '63, and only flew in '65. SpaceX would surely do it quicker now, with the benefit of experience, but from scratch to operations in a year for such a unique vehicle is quite unrealistic.

Dragon is only capable of crash-landing using its engines? I.e. there is not enough propellant, legs, etc... to do a soft landing? (not even considering take-off right now)

It can land on Earth, because it uses the atmosphere to shed most of its speed, and rockets for the very last couple hundred miles an hour. No such luck on the airless Moon.

Depends on the rocket. With some modifications and the right rocket it should be possible to land a Dragon 2 on the moon. However, there it will be for a very long time. No chance to come back.

If you want to send up more propellant, you need to send up even more propellant to get the propellant you want up to space. Which means you have no room left for your actual payload.

Back in 2013, before SpaceX had recovered any rockets at all, Elon Musk talked about how the way they were going to get reusable rockets was by making the rocket and the reusability more efficient: https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=26m30s

Not on the Moon. On Earth or Mars it can aerobrake away most of its orbital velocity but you can't do that on Mars. The Dragon 2 only carries 400 m/s of delta-v and you'd need 1.7 km/s to get from low lunar orbit to the surface even ignoring the need to brake into an orbit.

The Apollo LM first flew in earth orbit on the Apollo 9 mission in March 1969. Its first test flight was only 4 months before the Apollo 11 mission landed one on the moon! And the first all-up Saturn V flew unmanned in November 1967. The incentives and funding were there very rapid development.

Its first complete test flight, but there were years of development and testing of mockups and subsystems before.

A quick check also reveals that the LM carried in excess of 10 tons of fuel, when Dragon carries less than 1.5.

Note that NASA, I believe at Trump's urging, recently said they would try to place humans on the first flight of the Space Launch System (the new heavy lift rocket) - i.e., no unmanned testing first.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/nasa-looks-to-spe...

Is Musk still maintaining a relationship with Trump? When Uber founder Travis Kalanick left Trump's business council, Musk was still on it AFAIK. I wonder if Musk is doing this or announcing it for related reasons. Certainly Trump has a history, even in his short tenure, of pressuring businesses into announcements that suit his agenda. And the announcement seems to fit Trump's pattern: Impossible, brazen bravado. (Musk gives the impossible some credibility, but that's what is meant by lending someone your credibility.)

It's speculative, but it's also sad and a bad sign when we must look for government interference in the free market at this level, to provide propaganda for the President.

NASA agreed to do a study to see if they could place humans on the test flight. That seems to me like the NASA equivalent of saying "Sure, I'll look into that" while trying to not look horrified.

I'm pretty sure that study will conclude that this is a bad idea.

I sure hope so! I wouldn't want to be on that flight.

The NASA article brought to mind a story of a well-known Cosmonaut knowingly launching in an unreliable vehicle because the politicians insisted. He died. He flew because he didn't want his understudy to be killed in his place. (I'm sure someone on HN knows the story better than I do ...).

That sounds like Soyuz 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1

I know for a fact that NASA is still concerned about that Helium tank.

The explosion from that helium tank was slower than the emergency rockets on the dragon, from what I understand. So, had the capsule been fitted with them, it would have stayed entirely clear of the event. It'd be a rough ride, but it would have been a survivable event.

The thing is that NASA doesn't want to put anyone on something has the chance of doing that. The emergency system is for emergencies. Ideally it should NEVER be used. Vetting for manned missions is a lot different than cargo. That's all I'm getting at here. When rockets have recently exploded NASA gets pretty worried about putting humans on it.

For comparison, the Space Shuttle has NO emergency system and approximately a 2% catastrophic failure rate ...

It had a couple abort options if one or more SMEs failed. Unfortunately, none of the catastrophic failures were predicted.

Nature has a way to do things we don't expect it to do.

> had the capsule been fitted with them, it would have stayed entirely clear of the event. It'd be a rough ride, but it would have been a survivable event.

Safety isn't defined by, 'did it work out ok?', but by the risk. In this case, the outcome the parent describes is hypothetical; among other things, it assumes the emergency escape system would have worked perfectly. I assume NASA wants to evaluate the risk of the helium tanks, not the hypothetical outcome.

For example, some people have survived plane crashes; the fact that it worked out doesn't mean that the risk was acceptable.

> For example, some people have survived plane crashes; the fact that it worked out doesn't mean that the risk was acceptable.

The millions of people that fly every day despite past plane crashes would disagree with you.

Launch Abort is a system that should _never_ have to be activated. If you use Launch Abort, the series of failures preceding it was so catastrophic that you had no alternative to avoid loss of life.

I'm pretty sure Musk is doing what's reliably necessary to keep his companies running under Trump.

An administration full of oil wealth and climate change deniers are a significant business risk when you make electric cars and have States banking photovoltaics.

He needs to be within Trump's monkeysphere.

"Trump's monkeysphere" ...

I loved that. Thanks for a good chuckle.

Downvotes be damned.

I find this schedule very very unlikely. No humans have flown in the Dragon at all yet. Also none on any of SpaceX:s rockets. There have been lots of launch and pad failures.

I'm cheering for SpaceX for doing more towards spacefaring, but I'm very skeptical and think this will, at least, end up being negative PR to them, and, at worst, a lot more.

They had failures, but they're going forward. They launched again recently, and nailed the landing, again.

That said, I suppose we need to apply Elon Time coefficient here, and the Moon mission will end up being in 2019 / 2020. Still, I'm very excited, because for the first time in my life, the possibility of humans going to the Moon again within my lifetime feels actually real.

You didn't believe the Chinese when they said they would be there by 2035? :)

I'm glad to see somebody questioning the timescale. There is definitely a huge blind spot around Musk around here.

I'm the biggest fan of Elon there is, I'm pretty sure, but this still makes me nervous.

The timescale is bullshit-- the past two failures have both pushed things back a ways, and at this point I'm not optimistic there won't be more failures soon (although I strongly believe they'll succeed completely in the long term regardless). Things would have to go perfectly for this timescale to actually happen.

But what really makes me nervous is the thought of it going wrong and people dying. That would be pretty terrible. I feel like they need to do a lot more testing before they can send anyone around the moon in a mere 18-20months. That's just too soon. F9 is still having confusing failures after years in service. Falcon Heavy hasn't even flown once yet, nor Dragon 2.

"What if it's late," "What if someone dies", "It has to go perfectly or else." Mate there's no reason to slow down or criticize science and engineering for being late, having a death, or riding the razor's edge. Just get shit done. That's all that matters, this kind of internet fear-mongering is absolutely detrimental, even if there are huge risks involved in the process. We're not going to mess up the planet, but nay-sayers will absolutely slow us down.

"We'll do amazing things tomorrow!" and "We'll do amazing things the day after tomorrow!" are still amazing things; Musk timelines just come pre-Hofstadter'd.

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?

$82 millions according to the announcer at Kennedy Space Center while I was waiting for the Falcon 9 launch.

Are you talking about unmanned mission? Because he specifically mentioned crewed mission.

I am talking about the price Russia charges the US to send one human to the ISS. I guess the announcer wasn't correct. That amount would be for 2018.

http://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-seat...

http://www.businessinsider.com/space-travel-per-seat-cost-so...

Russia currently charges $58 million per seat to the ISS, with the price expected to increase to $80ish million by 2018.

If I remember correctly, the price of a Soyuz seat is around $20,000,000USD for tourists, with NASA's price to fly on Soyuz being much higher per seat.

Appears to be around $80M per seat. Great graph of how it increase from $20M in 2008 to $80M today after NASA permanently grounded its space shuttles:

http://www.businessinsider.com/space-travel-per-seat-cost-so...

At least from NASA's standpoint, looks like they budget single-digit $Billions for human spaceflight, out of a yearly budget in the range of $18B. I'm not sure how cleanly that can be broken down per-mission, since stays aboard the ISS can now exceed 12 months. https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/02/02/nasa-outlines-fy-2016-...

For perspective, it cost about $200 million to get your name on an America's Cup trophy. So as billionaire vanity projects go, this is pretty reasonable.

On a different end of the spectrum, Emily Calandrelli is giving a $35M figure for the last ISS ticket: https://twitter.com/TheSpaceGal/status/836333012056842240

> "Falcon Heavy is due to launch its first test flight this summer and, once successful, will be the most powerful vehicle to reach orbit after the Saturn V moon rocket."

SpaceX at its usual :) . By which criteria Energiya is less powerful vehicle to reach orbit than Falcon Heavy?

I think it's a bit of weird language. From comparing what specs I could find Energia had significantly greater LEO capacity (200% of Falcon Heavy), and a slight advantage in GTO payloads, a slight disadvantage at trans-lunar payloads and has no capacity at all for trans-Martian payloads where the Falcon Heavy can deliver 14,000kg/14 tonnes/30864.717lbs of payload.

So I think they are claiming that title due to Energia dropping off after trans-lunar ranges assuming Falcon Heavy reaches "orbit" and then travels further beyond.

Best news I've heard today, if I had that much $ I too would want to do something that only a handful of humans have ever experienced. If Elon reads this I will give you everything in my bank account and everything I will earn in the next 5 years to orbit the earth. It has been a dream of mine and seeing the privatization of space flight gets me so excited for the future. Sucks to be my kids as I hope I get to blow their inheritance on a trip to the moon.

I wonder if it is going to be only two people who are going to go. Will they add more people if they come forward with significant amount of money too?

Seems to me like the cost of taking in another person will be negligible in comparison to the funding they could contribute. This is literally a one-in-a-lifetime experience

Probably not a ton of extra space for a multi-day trip?

That's probably it. Not as much space I think, but life support for an extended period of time. This is one key difference between Dragon/CST-100 and Orion: the latter is designed for extended deep space travel with full crew, and can support them accordingly, while the former are primarily LEO taxis with more limited deep space capabilities.

The problem with the Orion is that there simply aren't many useful missions. Orion can also go around the moon, just like Dragon 2, but for both craft that is the end of the line (at least for Crewed versions).

The difference is that Orion cost about as much as Dragon 1, Dragon 2, Falcon and Falcon Heavy combined. If we add the cost of a SLS launch it goes into another dimension of cost.

Others will likely follow, per SpaceX, but I think this is a two person ride.

> "Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow."

The two private citizens will need a support team in capsule unless they are experienced astronauts and have the technical skills to learn all the systems on the dragon crew capsule.

Do you have a source stating that the people crewing the Dragon would need to do anything at all? Won't it just be on autopilot, what duties is the crew of the capsule expected to perform?

If something bad happens, you don't want to say "oh well, guess I should have sent an expert with them after all."

Why do we expect that an "expert" could do anything for an automated craft? Will there be soldering involved? Changing batteries? Rather than allowing for such things, just build more redundancy. Unlike Apollo, this program will have access to powerful computers and other electronic components.

Where would one find an expert in lunar circumnavigation?

Planes can take off, fly, and land themselves. Do you expect that a pilot can do anything for it? They don't solder anything, nor change batteries.

> Where would one find an expert in lunar circumnavigation?

The branch of astronautics that deals with navigation in space is called Astrodynamics. It is taught at universities across the world. You can find experts among the astronauts of the various space agencies. Or you can train your own, the same way those agencies do.

Which planes are these? I've never seen an autopilot that could take off or land.

The people who need to know astrodynamics are those who plan the tour. They will encode all the maneuvers required before launch. In the exceedingly unlikely event that corrections need to be made, they'll be made by radio. Even if they wasted an $80M berth on a pilot, where would she practice twiddling the knobs?

> Which planes are these? I've never seen an autopilot that could take off or land.

Have you seen many autopilots, to be that certain?

Civil planes equipped with autoland are commonplace.

Some fighter jets take off from carriers in autopilot. The pilots are actually required to grab a couple of handlebars in the cabin during take off, to make sure their instinct doesn't overcome them.

> In the exceedingly unlikely event that corrections need to be made

The set of bad things that can happen in a complex spacecraft isn't limited to needing a route correction. That is obvious, but even if it wasn't obvious to someone, history tells us.

> where would she practice twiddling the knobs?

Do you honestly think astronauts go to space untrained, because "where would they practice"?

They practice in simulators. Even the two tourists will have to be trained, for obvious reasons.

Im curious it might be two lovers, with intimate heavenly aspirations.

Joining the 10^-8 Parsecs High Club.

I imagine they don't want to send too many people up at first because 1) it's heavy and 2) there's a non-trivial risk of mission failure.

I love that a moon mission is a milestone en route to SpaceX' moonshot, not the moonshot itself. We need new idioms for these people.

It may seem less weird as trips to the moon become more common. We still use "flew too close to the sun" even though human powered flight at high altitudes is now common. It's more about the story of the original moonshot.

But flying close to the sun is still really bad. It's just we've never got close enough to the sun for it to be a problem.

Shouldn't they consider a staged approach, not unlike FDA trials. Start with a Laika dog, proceed with a chimp, as all other space programs have done in the past?

Also, if this succeeds, what happens to Google's moonshot projects? Is rebranding in the works?

Probably they should. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13745315

Well there's a huge difference when talking about radiation exposures going to the moon and Mars. For one you don't expect a solar event to happen, you really hope one doesn't, when going to the moon. Going to Mars you expect a few.

With cosmic radiation we're talking about the difference between a few days and a year. Plus you have to have pretty good shielding when crossing the Van Allen belts.

You can consider the Apollo missions the trial phases. We learned a lot there.

I'm less worried about this mission, and more than it's going to give people an (increasingly) false confidence that we're ready for Mars.

Ah, in that context, yes. We'll have to see a lot about the flight performance of the Heavy and whatever crew capsule they come up with. I would imagine they would do it similar to how the Apollo missions were done. First you do the dress rehearsal where no one lands. They could use that mission to put supplies in orbit as well. For Mars, they might need more than one. I'll be interested in what they come up with, but I still think their goal of 2025 is pretty quick. Doable, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Mars as a goal is laudable, but 2025 strikes me as more likely to be murderous. There's no doubt that human lives can grease the wheels of progress, and often have in the past. I feel like people have already accepted that as the way space will be too, when it still doesn't have to be... yet.

AFAIK, those incremental tests in the past were done because we didn't know the effect(s) space would have on humans. That's not really an issue now.

There's not much point in saying "Ok we've got this thing 98% safe let's send up a chimp and see if we explode" when you could just as easily not send up a chimp and get the results you need to get to the next level of safety, eventually reaching something reasonable to put humans in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_research_ban

There are ethical concerns and legal limitations regarding experimentation on some animals.

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!

This is what I'm referring to:

"...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...

Could be true, but SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell challenged that report directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjXYSJF-7Cs&t=16m31s

Shotwell's response is in the best interests of her company, but SpaceX is (as well as Boeing) woefully behind on a reasonable timeline to reach human-rated flight for both their rocket and crew module.

We should have learned from both the early Apollo program, and the Shuttle failures, that human lives shouldn't be treated as expendable capital in this industry.

Both SpaceX's current announcement, and the US Gov's desire to put humans on the first flight SLS flight, are deeply troubling in that regard.

> This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.

Shocking that it's been this long. There is an entire generation that hasn't seen man make it into deep space.

This is exciting news. Some time ago, looking at the F9 Heavy, it seemed to me that SpaceX could fly to the moon with it anytime they decided to. Of course their focus is the Mars. But in the day and age of multi-billionaires and the commercial availability of space flights via SpaceX, this makes absolutely sense. Private funding could push space flights much quicker ahead.

Finally the tin-foil hats can be satiated when these tourists see the 50-ish year old flag on the moon.

60-ish? More like 50-ish. I remember those landings and I'm nowhere near 60.

Weirdest thing, I can't delete this comment now that the other comment has been fixed.

Maybe they used an old flag?

edited.

No amount of data can convince a conspiracy theorist that they're wrong (the new data are just part of the conspiracy).

They'll just say the new images are faked, just as they say the original missions were.

The flags have been bleached white by the unfiltered solar UV due to lack of lunar atmosphere

NASA actually has a post on what the statuses of the flags are; they are probably bleached or disintegrated.[1] Interestingly, I would guess that the flag most likely to have survived would be the one from Apollo 11, because it was too close to the lander, and got knocked over by the ascent module; it may have been covered with dust and protected, but this is only a remote possibility.

note: the post says that the LROC shows shadows from the flags, but it seems highly unlikely they are pristine or even intact.

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloFlags-Condition.html

The LRO has provided great photos of Apollo landing sites with the LM base (and the Rovers for later missions) identifiable.

Still looking for the tall black monolith, though.

There's even the reverse - People who claim they can pinpoint the U.S moon flag with a telescope, trying their hardest to convince others the landings were real.

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-see-the-American-flag-on-the-m...

> ... two private citizens ... have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind ...

Except that these two private citizens are presumably absurdly wealthy. Whereas the nationalize space program which brought forth the Apollo mission gave all private citizens, as well as schoolchildren for generations, hope and aspirational outlooks.

Whereas the current national situation in the US, with respect to primary-school education and government-supported science is quite dire. So things are not at all hopeful right now, and many of us suffer nightmares of violence and deportation.

So, there's that.

>Except that these two private citizens are presumably absurdly wealthy. Whereas the nationalize space program which brought forth the Apollo mission gave all private citizens, as well as schoolchildren for generations, hope and aspirational outlooks.

I doubt it's any more difficult to get absurdly wealthy than to become an astronaut.

I'm sure they only sell you a ticket if you pulled yourself up out of the slums by your own bootstraps. No old money allowed.

What's your point?

Being born wealthy doesn't require much expended effort from the recipient of the wealth.

Which is relevant how?

    > I doubt it's any more difficult to
    > get absurdly wealthy than to become
    > an astronaut

Not very many people are born as astronauts, but some people are born very wealthy.

Yes, but the point was if you're not born wealthy you probably have a better chance of becoming wealthy than becoming a NASA astronaut.

Also, why do some people think being born with money is somehow bad, but being born with intelligence and drive is good? Aren't they both down to luck?

In the end, they send Trump to space.

Sure, but right now no country actually has a deep-space human mission program. So SpaceX doing what they do is actually pretty exciting for everyone - especially that the express intent of Elon is to significantly drop down the costs of getting to space. If they can succeed in that then who knows, maybe our children will have an actual chance of leaving this planet, even if for a short while.

The first cars were only accessible to the "absurdly wealthy". So was air travel. Most things when you think about them, in fact. That doesn't mean the rest of us didn't aspire to have them and eventually have access to them thanks to all that early adopter funded R&D.

Well in a way these are fantastic news. But on the other side they are totally reckless news.

What if the Sun has a SEP event during that period? Everyone on board will die in the period from hours to days from exposure to radiation.

We presently have absolutely no knowledge on how to predict that this will happen or to protect a ship in case it happens.

The Moon missions where done before we knew of the existence of SEPs and fortunately we were lucky... but we are not supposed to just rely on luck now that we know they exist.

Next year seems extremely ambitious. Wouldn't humans next year, mean non-crewed test flight this year?

I wonder what NASA is thinking about this? The NASA Commercial Crew program which helped fund the development of the Dragon was funded for manned flight to the ISS. I'm curious if they see this as part of the project scope?

Read the article: "By also flying privately crewed missions, which NASA has encouraged, long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions."

The COTS and Commercial Crew program have specifically been made so that Companies can reuse the hardware for other projects as well. This is the exact thing that NASA has hoped for.

So, what happens when you take a moon hoaxer, and I mean a really ardent believer, and fly them around the moon? Presumably they've already seen much of the evidence we've been there multiple times before and discounted it in lieu of some more more fanciful (in our eyes) explanation. Does that shatter when you're looking at the moon through a porthole, or do you explain it away somehow?

I find it interesting, because usually conspiracy theorists can't really be presented with enough hard evidence to replicate the scenario in question.

I want to know what the insurance company of the private citizens says to this.

I'm more interested in knowing how google plans to insure both Larry and Sergey while they're engaging on such a dangerous mission.

I wonder who the people going on this trip are. Are they billionaires, a rich couple planning a honeymoon. You'd have to be rich to do this right? I also wonder which kind of insurance both Spacex and the individuals have for this.

It's amazing that private companies are now doing things that were previously only one by governments and nations.

I don't know how this will work out but congratulations to Musk, Spacex and NASA.

That's really stretching the definition of private company considering NASA is the major provider of both funding and infrastructure.

A lot of innovation was initially funded by the government especially in Silicon Valley. That said, Spacex is still legally a private company.

Many a time, when companies engage in capital intensive business endeavours they need someone to provide some incentive or even build the initial technology. NASA does this here much like DARPA did with the Internet's initial infrastructure.

It's not stretching the definition at all.

You can hardly be a large business in any developed nation without having substantial business relationships with various world governments.

See: Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Boeing, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin, Ford, GM, 3M, Berkshire Hathaway, General Electric, etc.

Might as well pretend Medtronic, Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson aren't private, because they do so much business with government healthcare systems.

I for one consider such companies to be quasi-government organizations. Especially to the degree that their products are purchased by the government via something other than a open market bid.

Dell doesn't purchase from Microsoft at an open market bid, either. No big organization purchases at open market bid if they can help it. In contrast, the U.S. government is frequently required to purchase on an open market bid (more or less, I'm not sure what your definition of "open market bid" is).

I wonder what kind of training they'll be required to go through. A majority of NASA astronauts have had military training. How can you guarantee that an eccentric billionaire won't lose his cool once he's orbiting a heavenly body?

So it seems the big challenge with landing and taking off from the moon is carrying that much fuel. A robotic module on the moon that converts water, carbon and sunlight to rocket fuel should solve that problem.

Is anyone else imagining the mission is going to discretely drop such a module when it's in the moon's shadow or do I just have an overactive imagination?

well, all you have to do now is get all that water and carbon to the moon, I guess.

I think that, as Elon pointed out, it can really be an interesting source of income to deploy entirely on the "Mars Project".

I really root for 'em even though I know that China has started working on a similar business-model-trip back in '03 and they still haven't made any public announcement or published a precise launch year...

No one would be happier than me if they pull this off. However, I think the timeline is super ambitious. They never had to deal with human passengers till now, meaning they have to develop all that skill set in 1.5 years. Even with significant help from NASA/Russia this sounds like an extremely tall order to me.

So basically it's the government using private institutions for space too now. Welcome! (Sarcastic)

Finally. I am so so hyped for SpaceX's development. Hopefully they can stay afloat to experience stability and a stage where they can sit on funding and provide credit for fusion and/or antimatter research. Glad they're here to give us a glimpse into the future of space travel.

So when will they launch a Falcon Heavy with a Dragon, unmanned? They've got to try that first. Will the initial Falcon Heavy test flight carry a Dragon spacecraft?

Wasn't being able to support and protect the crew beyond LEO the "killer feature" of the Orion?

If you can do it with a Dragon, what niche is Orion left with?

Which would be more expensive: a personal SpaceX flight to the Moon, or personally funding a high-speed rail line from Seattle to Vancouver?

Definitely rail, which is something like a zillion dollars per mile. The moon trip is only $40-160M.

$40-$160M? I didn't realize just how far the price had fallen for a literal moonshot... Thanks!

Count on SpaceX to renew faith in humanity. ^_^

so much opportunity for celebration and at the same so much opportunity to destroy the company. hope they do a few dry runs that we get to watch because while this could be a publicity event of incredible benefit it can just as easily backfire

I wonder who the two people are.

Hope they like each other.

I wonder what the life insurance policy costs -- though perhaps in this case these individuals don't need one due to their existing wealth. I guess super-wealthy people just "self insure" eh?

"Next Year" in Musk time; that's about 2022.

zuck and priscilla?

Donald and Vladimir?

I don't think the world is that lucky.

That would be very Moscow 2042-ish.

"We seem to have somehow miscalculated our trajectories and the vehicle is now permanently locked in low lunar orbit forever with no recourse. Sorry for the inconvenience."

2001 Nights - Night 1: Earthglow

Zuck going around the moon would make sense.

He clearly has political ambitions, but he must acquire personality. Being an space-tourist would help.

How on Earth (pun intended) would that help?

Same way politician candidates often acquire some military background. It builds their profile and they have something to tell stories about. It doesn't really matter what they actually did there.

In modern times, most people at least in the US doesn't have military experience and they tend to give it a somewhat mythical status. Those who do, can feel that the candidate relates to them.

So it can be an rhetoric for anything "you know, the time was I went around moon, this happened, which made me realize that x is more important than y". No-one can really discount that experience easily or politely since they haven't done that, and somewhat more admirable and mythical than creating a social networking website.

...and back!

Mission name Apollo-X. Anyone?

not landing

that's cool, but kerbal-easy

I'm gonna make my tip, given Elon's history:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Two of his freind rich enough, geeky enough, to go first.

Something tells me they wouldn't both go on the same trip, given the risk.

yeah, their insurance company would be furious :)

Insurance company?

Why would billionaires waste their money or time on insurance?

just imagine the effects on Alphabet's stock price

they don't care, they own majority of voting rights and almost the stocks itself

I would maybe guess Branson and Bezos as a stunt promoting private space tourism and thereby their space companies :)

Wouldn't that be admitting defeat?

the should send mining robots to build a base unmanned first.

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.

Did some more research, and yes, Apollo 13 was indeed the furthest in geocentric distance as well.

Great, so with good timing we can both get a great view and set a record simultaneously.

Trumps going to space!

https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/

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.

Presumably they will test the spacecraft at least once before sending it out manned. We sent crewed capsules around the moon without landing during the Apollo program too.

They're doing a Falcon Heavy launch beforehand (at least once) before this mission takes place.

Well the spacecraft will be tested multiple times before this mission and there are health and fitness tests before departure just like it says there. Both of those were addressed, I think you may have misread this.

You're right I misread the testing part. I'd very much still like to know who those people are and what their thought process is.

I'd like to know the thought process of people who have this much money and don't want to orbit the moon.

I think you're missing the point, of course in an ideal situation where risk is minimized that would be a good question. But by focusing on money I think you neglected to address the obvious point that I raised namely what if it blows up.

I didn't miss that point!

Is it still a thing, where going to space makes you infertile due to radiation? I feel like I remember basically once you go into space (male or female) kids are off the table afterwards unless you have frozen your sperm or eggs beforehand. Not sure if that was solved at some point or not.

>A 2005 study Jennings co-authored counted 17 babies born to female astronauts after they had been in space.

https://phys.org/news/2011-01-sex-space-houston-problem.html

According to stack exchange, it doesn't [0]. If that's wrong maybe I can fund a trip to space of my own by selling lead lined boxers.

[0] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14704/do-astronauts...

As long as you stay near the Earth (the moon is close enough), our magnetosphere will protect you from radiation.

When you get interplanetary, like on a trip to Mars, radiation exposure becomes arguable the most difficult problem to solve.

Source?

> The Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE) was launched in 2001 in order to collect more data. Estimates are that humans unshielded in interplanetary space would receive annually roughly 400 to 900 mSv (compared to 2.4 mSv on Earth) and that a Mars mission (12 months in flight and 18 months on Mars) might expose shielded astronauts to roughly 500 to 1000 mSv. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays...

Do you see the comments on one site: "about 2 rich fat cats all ego-ed out who paid Space X tens of millions, just smiling from ear to ear and gloating that the whole world is watching them make history, and the rest of us "lowlanders" have to watch them with envy - - only to have it by mere chance turn into a Roman spectacle - - - - of the whole world watching as they get bar-be-qued in space, never to see earth again.

A massive crowd will be assembled to attempt a Guinness book of world records, to moon the stars with bare asses all in unison in a soccer stadium just as they blast off into space, yelling out like the Romans did at the coliseum: "We salute you those who are about to DIE !" then post it on YouTube !

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.

Apollo had manned space missions before that.

SpaceX plans to do this Moon mission only after they had manned missions to the ISS.

The cold war? A national effort? Dead crews during the project?

I mean, I'm half joking, I believe that it is a possible objective, as much as it is possible to manufacture 500k Model 3s a year.. next year. Possible, but a monumental effort and something on which Musk strongly disagrees even with the top managers in his own companies.

The space ship is already being developed for the Commercial Crew program. The rocket is a new rocket but with the same engines and the same upper stage.

This does not seem so impossible. A couple of delays will happen, but all in all, there is no fundamental problem.

I agree, there is no fundamental problem. But that couple of delays will bring the actual date much further away than "late next year". I'm sure Elon Musk is capable of great things, it's just that he's very obviously squeezing the people in his companies to the limits and beyond, by publicly announcing objectives that are just about possible, provided that his employees will work day and night for entire years.

I simply don't understand why people are always up in arms about his companies being so bad with their employees. Lots of companies push people to do more ours. God knows, I have worked insane hours for far worse reasons.

Plus the actual evidence for Elons companies being far worse then anybody else is not really there.

Plus, its not like all those educated people that work at SpaceX would live in the gutter if they can't do the job.

That's a completely different matter, I just meant to say that Elon Musk's estimates are often extremely optimistic.

You know (if you're a developer) when you're working on a very exciting piece of code that will do wonderful stuff, and you have clear in your head what you're doing and how to do it, and think "it'll take me an hour, can't wait to see it working" and then at 4 AM you're still there, always in the same state of mind, with half of your brain asleep and the other half still perfectly focused on the result? Yep, I think that's Elon Musk. Still in the splendour of his early twenties :)

Hey, you're right. First flight of the Saturn V was November 1967. First trip around the moon was December 1968.

They are going to test the rocket later this year, and the rocket is based on the F9 design, so nothing done from scratch. The crew capsule is also just an enhancement of the capsule which travelled to the ISS and back again several times. It also is going to be tested with flights to the ISS before this planned moon mission. Once you exchange the F9 for the F9 Heavy, going to the moon is not really anyhow more difficult than going to the ISS. You need a bigger launch speed, but then you orbit the Moon and return back. A Moon landing however would be a distinctively different effort.

Ok, let's put it like this: how much are you willing to bet that they'll be sending two passengers around the Moon on board of Falcon Heavy/ Dragon 2 next year?

Plus they've had 2 rockets go explody over the last two years.

This is really premature. I'd be surprised if they do this by 2020.

One was a ground incident that wouldn't have had people nearby even with a manned mission, and the other would have saved its passengers with the abort system.

And if people are willing to pay the money and take the risk, why not?

> One was a ground incident that wouldn't have had people nearby even with a manned mission, and the other would have saved its passengers with the abort system.

Not sure how that would mitigate the risk of explody Space-X rockets?

Exactly the way it was described. People are on board the rocket for the minimal amount of time before launch and not during the most risky operations in order to mitigate the risk of explosion. While the people are on board the rocket there are systems in place to increase their chances of escape, again mitigating the risk.

e: I realize you are saying none of this reduces the risk of the rocket exploding but at some point that doesn't matter because there's never going to be an absolute guarantee. The mitigation of risk that the rocket explodes is the further test flights the new rocket will complete before a manned mission to the moon.

Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.

> Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.

Uh no.. they're losing MORE rockets now than before, mostly because the rockets are getting bigger and more powerful - and they have the Heavy versions coming.

Consider that 2 of their last 13 rockets exploded.. that's not a good track record. Compare that to ULA, which hasn't had an explosion over 100 Atlas/Delta launches.

I don't think either of the explosions were related to the rockets getting bigger or more powerful. The CRS-7 failure would have happened on any version of the Falcon 9. It happened on that particular one because that one happened to have a defective strut. The AMOS-6 explosion happened because of their experiments with supercooled propellants.

Two losses in two years is a lot better than the very early days when they lost their first three Falcon 1s in a row, but worse than the early years of Falcon 9 where the only failure was a single engine out that didn't hurt the primary payload, and is certainly not a good track record overall.

Please stop saying explody

I thought you had brought them up in terms of risk to human life. Otherwise I don't see how it's relevant.

Onto next year? Not too much. Schedules slip, and space flight schedules even slip faster. But if not 2018, 2019 would be very likely. The next big milestone is the F9 Heavy flight. Other than that, they first have to fly a manned mission to the ISS first. Once that has been achieved, flying around the moon is not especially difficult, probably technically even easier than to the ISS, as less precision is required.

This announcement is considerably less vaporous than the Mars plan he announced.

I'm not gonna lie...I'd be fine with several directors resigning.

Musk's #1 goal from the beginning is to put a lot of people on Mars, and do it in a rather short time (per human-history scale). We're talking a guy who literally invented PayPal just to make enough money to really get the project started. His other endeavors are as well, while laudable in their own right, really just ways of accumulating the resources to achieve that goal.

Musk did not invent PayPal. He founded x.com which merged with PayPal two years after PayPal was founded.

He has also been clear that he had three goals:

1) Expanding solar power use.

2) Popularizing electric vehicles.

3) Making human life multi-planetary.

I am paraphrasing and perhaps understating his desired level of success.

Go read Musk's biography at WaitButWhy.com - and you'll see that summarizing it into a two-line post is difficult. Suffice to say it all serves the goal of colonizing Mars.

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