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Comment by davidklemke | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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

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