SpaceX Crewed Dragon Circumlunar Mission

[DragonRider]

I just feel like in a strange way Trump will end up being the best thing to happen to Space in a long time and Elon is smart enough to stay close to him.

Drove past Tesla factory yesterday. All the electronic ad boards cycled through ads, and each time, each board, had a stark text only black and white ad that said:

"Elon, dump Trump!"

...and Elon is wise enough not to take that advice onboard, I think he has a rare opportunity here to ride in the slipstream of Trump's ambitions, he's smart enough to realize how to use them for the benefit of SpaceX.

[Dalhousie]

Must be some bad news coming up.

[Herb Schaltegger]

They explicitly allow non-certified launch vehicles.

Understood.  However:
- All such missions still require an FAA launch license; use of non-certified vehicles does not mean "no FAA license required".

But again (and forgive me - it's been some time since I read the regs), isn't the prime driver for approval or denial of a launch license the mitigation of risk to the public from the launch activity?

If so, the fact that the vehicle carries a spaceflight participant shouldn't play into the decision rationale aside from whether or not such participants have been given a reasonable warning of the inherent risks and chosen to proceed in the face of such risks.

[matthewkantar]

Please stop calling them tourists. They are not. I'd call them adventurers, explorers, something like that. Not tourists. They are not going to turn up and go, like a tourist would.

They could very well just turn up and go. A turnip could do it. With a food and water dispenser a dog or chimp could do this. They are TOURISTS.

Matthew

[Oli]

it is a joy ride/ ego trip. Looks bad if you ask me.

Matthew

That's the future of commercial human spaceflight. You better get used to it.

Humanity should abandon space if it doesn't care about diversity. The problem is not so much too much whiteness; it's a total lack of any other colour.

I will never understand the obsession with skin color. For me diversity means different culture. Funnily enough nationalists and isolationists are more likely to preserve cultural diversity (not that I am one myself).

Ok that's all from me. 

[meekGee]

My take is that of this flight goes well, a commercial lunar landing won't be too far behind...

Actually I think this is the biggest misconception about this flight.

This mission gets you closer to a lunar landing in the same way that SS2 gets you closer to orbital flight - not one bit, except by way of PR.

This is no Apollo 8, which was a step along a carefully engineered path to a lunar landing.

This is a step towards long duration spaceflight, but there's nothing really "moony" about it.  They might as well have just done a very high elliptical orbit. (Technology-wise)

I think round-the-moon is the ultimate bang-for-buck in space tourism, and that it will become an awesome revenue source (I preached this before), but this is not leading to a moon landing.

IMO.

[strip mine the moon]

is falcon heavy enough to put the 2nd stage and dragon in earth orbit?
is the 2nd stage restartable enough to handle course corrections to and from the moon?
granted this will be a free return trajectory but still the earth reenty corridor is not that large
unless you are willing to land anywhere on earth.
just things I remember from the Apollo missions.

[mme]

Space tourism is a side show. I hope these stunt persons paid full price for this. Seems to have little upside and many possible pitfalls. This make SpaceX seem less serious.

Matthew

So if a government pays for it, it's serious?

It does not matter who pays for it IMO, it is not science, it is not pushing back a frontier, providing a service like satellites, it is a joy ride/ ego trip. Looks bad if you ask me.

Matthew

I have trouble imagining SpaceX not getting all sorts of valuable data and experience from this fully funded mission. To me this is no more a stunt than landing boosters in the ocean was.

[Rocket Science]

Intriguing article Chris, thank you!

[joek]

But again (and forgive me - it's been some time since I read the regs), isn't the prime driver for approval or denial of a launch license the mitigation of risk to the public from the launch activity?

If so, the fact that the vehicle carries a spaceflight participant shouldn't play into the decision rationale aside from whether or not such participants have been given a reasonable warning of the inherent risks and chosen to proceed in the face of such risks.

Correct.  A spaceflight participant's risk does not (at least pro-forma) factor into whether the FAA grants a license.  However, the FAA does require some level of due diligence--you can't simply say "the spaceflight participant has signed and accepted the risk... so we're good to go on the first flight of our experimental vehicle which no one has ever flown on".  The delta between what commercial and FAA wants is an ongoing discussion and no clear lines have yet been defined to my knowledge.  So essentially case-by-case at this point as far as I can tell.

[John Alan]

Just stick a couple of these on the inside and go fly... 

[rmencos]

Space tourism is a side show. I hope these stunt persons paid full price for this. Seems to have little upside and many possible pitfalls. This make SpaceX seem less serious.

Matthew

So if a government pays for it, it's serious?

It does not matter who pays for it IMO, it is not science, it is not pushing back a frontier, providing a service like satellites, it is a joy ride/ ego trip. Looks bad if you ask me.

Matthew

Space tourism is a side show. I hope these stunt persons paid full price for this. Seems to have little upside and many possible pitfalls. This make SpaceX seem less serious.

Matthew

So if a government pays for it, it's serious?

It does not matter who pays for it IMO, it is not science, it is not pushing back a frontier, providing a service like satellites, it is a joy ride/ ego trip. Looks bad if you ask me.

Matthew

I think calling them "tourists" is what takes away from what is being proposed.  It's like the guy in The Right Stuff who said that Gus Grissom was just doing what monkeys could do.  This isn't a joy ride.  Two people are paying a lot of money to be guinea pigs on barely tested rocket and capsule, and go further into a hostile environment than any human in 50 years.  This is truly historic for our generation if SpaceX can pull it off.  Call these guys (or gals) adventurers, spacefarers or pioneers.  Anybody can be a tourist.

[jgoldader]

Well.

This quite possibly explains the request to see about putting crew on EM-1.  I doubt this came as a surprise to the President.  I would not want to be the briefer who has to give the EM-1 report.

I'd say this is typically audacious for Musk, but it's more.  There are a lot of things that have to move into place for this to happen, obviously.  But if it happens, it strikes me as the most significant event in space development since STS-1. It's a high stakes gamble that opens up cislunar space in one swoop.  One giant leap, indeed.

What does this mean for NASA HSF?   I obviously don't know.  What I do suspect is that the status quo for SLS is off the table now.  It will probably take a year or two to really shake out, and seriously nasty political battles, but I don't know how the current slow, expensive, vague plans will be able to deal with a successful Dragon flight to the moon.

I'm almost 50, and don't remember the moon landings.  I might not live long enough to see people back on the moon, but with a little luck, I may get to see *privately funded* missions around it.

[Rocket Science]

I feel the nomenclature "private astronaut" suffices in this case...

[montyrmanley]

There are a lot of things that have to move into place for this to happen, obviously.  But if it happens, it strikes me as the most significant event in space development since STS-1. It's a high stakes gamble that opens up cislunar space in one swoop.  One giant leap, indeed.

Maybe.

A circumlunar flight is still just a baby step. We get out of LEO, so great; but we still don't have any infrastructure to live or work beyond LEO, and this mission -- while cool -- would do little to nothing to advance that goal. Nor is it intended to, really; Musk is doing two things with this mission: selling a pleasure-cruise to two extremely wealthy people and generating income for his company; and he'll be conducting a vital engineering test of various components of his company's spacecraft and ground systems. If SpaceX gets reusability of the various components, "moon cruises" might even prove a profitable line of business for SpaceX. There are lots of wealthy people in the world who'd pay for a trip like that.

But exploitation of cislunar space is going to need more than a big booster rocket and capsule. We need refueling depots, space tugs, comm sats at earth/moon L1/L2, etc. And I'm not even getting into the larger scale habs, refining, and assembly facilities that we'll need to build in order for our presence in cislunar space to be sustainable.

This will be a project of decades, not years. But as the old saying goes, the first step on any long journey begins with leaving your house!

[matthewkantar]

As far as "regulatory bounds" go, all of that is being reassessed/ scrapped by the current presidential administration, so who knows what will be left on the books by the end of 2018.

Matthew

[HIP2BSQRE]

Why the announcement now??

[LouScheffer]

I'm somehow glum about this announcement. [...] This hurts and makes me a bit angry. People with extreme amounts of money are yet again able to buy their way though life.

Am I alone in this?

What makes me glum is not rich people doing something interesting - it's that we need rich folks, volunteers, or both, to get this stuff done in the first place.  Why should it be Rotary that's trying to get rid of polio?  Why does it take Gates to attack malaria?  Why do we need a few rich private customers to finance BEO technology?  What is a government for, if not to do those projects that are both difficult and useful?

[Rocket Science]

Why the announcement now??

Maybe it gives NASA an easy out...

[meekGee]

Fascinating. I jumped on late, expecting to find the NSF servers on fire. I'm not disappointed.

That said, my first reaction was: This was not Musk's style. He's been serious about developing tools to explore Mars. If Jeff Bezos proposed this, I wouldn't have bat one eyelash.

But I continued to read here and began thinking in the long-term. It's all about financing. Musk cannot guarantee much with NASA beyond 2024 beyond perhaps a satellite launch or two, and some comsat flights. He'll need a new revenue stream.

I wouldn't be the first to sign up, and he'd be a fool not to make a test flight, but this is certainly a 9.5 on the amazing people Pucker Factor meter.

If Musk had gone for a lunar landing, you'd be right, since that would be a distraction...

But I'd suggest that multi-day flights would be a pre-requisite for any long term manned missions, and if someone is paying, why not start now?