How long before commercial flights to space(Not LEO but HEO)/around the Moon?

[A_M_Swallow]

{snip}
 
Please can i ask if anyone knows of the price for flights to the 'edge of Space'?

$200,000 a passenger with Virgin Atlantic.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking

[Scia]

Falcon Heavy 9 + dragon I think easy could do cis-lunar flight.
1pilot and 6 customers.
Price could be somewhere around 20-40 millions. I think they will  have "plenty of customers".
 If I have this money I will buy it,but I will not spend millions for earth orbit flight.

Seven crew on an eight day trip on 10m³? The supposed 14m³ pressurized space, is for cargo. A crew version would be more along 10m³. And you need a bathroom.
Besides, a Dragon to the ISS is calculated at 133M. A Falcon Heavy is 68M extra. That's 200M. And the Dragon isn't even developed for BEO.

But can't it be modified for BEO?

why would they create a LAS that allows dragon to " provide the capability for Dragon to land almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy'

If they did not intend for it to go BEO

They have also said that getting to mars was the long term/Main Goal of the company.

[vt_hokie]

If you believe the Dragon to Mars hype, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you! Seriously, before Elon Musk starts trying to sell us on SpaceX to Mars, I'd like to see some operational success and mastery of LEO ops, plus a realistic architecture proposed for these beyond-LEO missions.

[buel]

Is Elon Musk/SpaceX promising a lot but delivering little then?

[baldusi]

A future Dragon, could be used as a crasher capsule for Mars, if it were to fly there in a spaceship that provided the habitation space, power and delta-v to get there. It would also need a LV to go up. So, even from the hypothetical POV, what they stated, while not a lie, has more spin than the RS-25D turbopump.

[kkattula]

Is Elon Musk/SpaceX promising a lot but delivering little then?

He/they have delivered a helluva lot in a relatively short time, but the 'promises' (more like letting us in on their vision of the future) are huge.

[neutrino78x]

I just hope NASA is going to expedite the human rating on these commercial rockets. As of the next (and last) shuttle flight, we will be officially dependent on the Russians. This is not the time for NASA to play games with making up new requirements so it takes Commerical forever. They need to have one specification, and not modify it, so SpaceX et al. can knock this thing out in a year or so.

Luckily there is no military need for human spaceflight right now. But it sure would be nice to send USA astronauts up on USA rockets instead of Russian, despite it being the "International" Space Station.

--Brian

[ugordan]

I just hope NASA is going to expedite the human rating on these commercial rockets.

Rockets are not the big problem, the spacecraft are.

[neutrino78x]

Rockets are not the big problem, the spacecraft are.

Well whatever it is that requires a human rating, NASA needs to make sure this is not something that is going to take 20 years. That would be really frustrating. Don't play games, NASA. Just give a succinct series of tests that these companies can do so we can get this ball rolling.

--Brian

[Jason1701]

Rockets are not the big problem, the spacecraft are.

Well whatever it is that requires a human rating, NASA needs to make sure this is not something that is going to take 20 years. That would be really frustrating. Don't play games, NASA. Just give a succinct series of tests that these companies can do so we can get this ball rolling.

--Brian

The way I see it, NASA doesn't have much of a choice but to get the ball rolling quickly. If they hinder the human-rating process, the companies can fly tourists and other nations' astronauts to Bigelow stations under FAA approval, and NASA can keep paying twice the price to the Russians.