Although this post will annoy certain people, this is a perfect proof on why Musk amazing peopleism is a bad thing. To put it short, SpaceX did show significant progress during the last few years. But he dropped far too many promising plans. Red Dragon. Lunar Dragon. Falcon Heavy for human missions.
Nobody really believes BFR will be ready around 2025, right? The Heavy delays spread within a 5-year period. I'd say that if Musk says 2025, in reality this means 2030.
This in fact means more delays for beyond-Low Earth Orbit missions. However, I prefer for Musk and other private companies to stop talking too much about Moon and Mars and focus on near space. It's closer. How about sending a man to space before this decade is out?
Yes it annoys people like me, for example.
This whole 'Musk amazing peopleism' thing is really starting to annoying me. Not the alleged 'Musk amazing peoples' but the ones who engage in the noble battle of reminding others how stupid they're for trusting Musk, how irrational they're to think SpaceX's goals have a chance, how they should know better. I'm tired of people who start their arguments by discounting who disagrees with them and their opinion as wrong because they're 'irrational amazing peoples'. When you do it you do not become the bearer of the rational truth, you're just arrogant.
Guess what? From my experience I've found more irrationality and bias in the 'amazing people fighters' than in the ones they fight. It's not rational to engage in a personal crusade against an entrepreneur you don't even know because for whatever reason you hate his guts
(not saying it is your case, just that I've seen many cases like this).
Most importantly: it's not rational to always assume the worst, it's not rational to predict the future basing solely on past performance pretending nothing has changed and progress doesn't exist.
No one in recent history has more experience in actually developing, building and operating rocket engines, reusable LVs, space capsules, building new launchpads and GSE, heck nobody has more actual, recent experience in flat-out rocket development than SpaceX has, at least not in the US! Despite all this many still treat them as inexperienced newcomers, dreamers with silly projects who don't know what they're talking about, always bet against them instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt.
To those people I say: that's irrationality! Always assuming the worst doesn't makes you a realist, it makes you a pessimist.
Nobody really believes BFR will be ready around 2025, right?
Yes, yes I do. Guess I'm a amazing people for this right?
Well I'll tell you something: I'm convinced it's possible for it to launch into orbit well before 2022. The reason is many see the delays with FH, Crew Dragon, see Elon setting 'aspirational' deadlines and assume SpaceX is intrinsically not capable of delivering on schedule. I think there is more than that, and not analyzing the reasons behind those delays is superficial and leads to wrong conclusions. And those reasons are not only 'Elon sets impossible deadlines'. Thinking it all comes to that is not rational.
-FH is not 5 years late, the 2011 Falcon Heavy will never exist. Today's rocket is essentially its replacement with a different structural design, very different capabilities, reuse of the first stage. It wasn't only a different rocked for its design, but especially for its purpose: when it was introduced in 2011 the intentions were to 'launch as many Falcon 9s as Heavies', it was an important project, key to entering an existing market outside the capabilities of F9. But then, as the latter kept evolving, the purpose for FH kept eroding. With F9 Full thrust the design of the Heavy had to be heavily modified accordingly while its usefulness appeared more limited than ever, further slowing down its development.
None of this apply to BFR: it is now not only useful for SpaceX, but necessary for their constellation, Mars, and their sheer existence given how they're essentially betting everything on it. Also it doesn't have the disadvantage of depending on another evolving development flow like Falcon Heavy did with Falcon 9. -Crew Dragon too had to adapt and change its development flow for Commercial Crew: Commercial Crew Crew Dragon is different from the manned capsule that Elon said would come 4 years after Cargo Dragon. Its development is late nonetheless, but 2 years late, not 5. Not only that, but those Commercial Crew delays are in part independent from SpaceX and, as many sources have stated, partly result from the difficulties of working with NASA and 'translating' between one development philosophy and another.
Even in this case the BFR is a whole different story: they're trying to stay as independent as possible from other entities.To sum up: the BFR is not only revolutionary as a vehicle: its development process is revolutionary in itself. It won't be paperwork-oriented, demonstrate it on paper before flight NASA style: it will leverage reusability
from the start, with BFS suborbital testing and demonstrate its design by actually flying, cheaply, and acquiring flight history in doing so. Not to mention it will fully take advantage of SpaceX's development agility.
The genius lies in the fact that this Second stage + spacecraft design is so versatile that it's very prone to iteration: you can start by flying suborbitally the basic ship without the heath shield and acquire confidence in the design. Most of this confidence then gets passed by while the vehicle gradually transitions to the orbital cargo version by adding the heath shield, the payload interface and the dispensing equipment, and finally to a crew vehicle. Improvements can be even passed horizontally from one version to the others when they all fly. Other crewed capsules only acquire flight history by actually flying manned, the BFS will be proven in its reliability well before it flies crewed. The airframe, the propulsion systems, the tankage, the EDL will be flight tested with high fidelity from the beginning. I think it is possible for it to surclass every previous launch system in reliability very early in its development (1-2 years since the first orbital flight) and sport unprecedented reliability by expendable spaceflight standards (many orders of magnitude better) at the end of its development cycle (mid to late 2020s).
That's why I think it'll be much faster and easier to go from BFS cargo to the manned one (with cislunar ECLSS) than it has been to go from cargo dragon to crew dragon, and that a Lunar cruise could be possible in 2021-2022.