Netflix announces Space X documentary on civilian mission into orbit

Also leadership by storytelling. Don't say what you want, tell a story that shows people what you want, so they can envision themselves doing what you want.

> Musk overviewed his five step engineering process, which must be completed in order:

> 1. Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. He notes that it’s particularly dangerous if someone who is smart gives them the requirements, as one may not question the requirements enough. “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.” He further notes that “all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”

> 2. Try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted. Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.

> 3. Simplify and optimize the design. This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.

> 4. Accelerate cycle time. Musk states “you’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”

> 5. Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing.

So I think using this silly method, I would personally expect the price of a moon round trip to be maybe $100k. That's just market-pricing guesses though, I do not know what the costs of such a trip would actually be. But again, Elon does like to set a price target for the public and then do the engineering and production required to meet that target, so I would be surprised to see something less than an E2E hop or more than a Mars ticket, to go to the Moon and come back.

Yes. Besides the shuttle flight denvercoder9 mentioned,[1] there was one Skylab mission with all-rookie astronauts, and a few Gemini two-man flights. So one shuttle flight out of 135, and about four other NASA missions before that. (Obviously I'm excluding the six Mercury one-man flights that were by definition flown by rookies.) NASA always prefers having the commander (the actual pilot), at least, to have flown in space before. The upcoming Crew-3 is unusual in having a rookie commander, but at least the pilot (i.e., copilot) has flown in space before.

This is why NASA has always chosen people with very high-performance aircraft experience as pilot astronauts; it's the best known way to predict beforehand how someone will do at piloting spacecraft, an inherently dangerous and high-stress environment with complex tasks.

Most of the recent news coverage over the "Mercury 13" was nonsense, but especially the stuff about how the women who participated in that endeavor were "trained as NASA astronauts" or "qualified as NASA astronauts". NASA didn't restrict the selection process for the Mercury 7 to exclude women, but to select the best from the US's pool of active-duty military fixed-wing pilots who had graduated from test pilot school. Yes, no women had attended test pilot schools or flew combat military aircraft, but neither did the vast majority of its soldiers, military officers, or even military pilot officers. (Army, too. There has never been a US Army pilot astronaut,[2] and the first Army mission specialists wasn't selected until 1978.)

[1] And even here, Joe Engle was a NASA rookie but had flown to space on the X-15

[2] The most unrealistic part of I Dream of Jeannie is Roger Healey as a 1960s NASA astronaut who is an Army officer

People there are not paying for the attraction and they are also aware with associated risks.