SpaceX Crewed Dragon Circumlunar Mission

[SweetWater]

Nail on head. These plans seem to be the ultimate example of putting the cart before the horse as they say.

Building a transport architecture that would allow colonization will vastly speed up all intermediate steps.

Including going to the moon, to be even remotely on topic.

Going to Mars on the scale Space X proposes has always seemed a case of trying to run before you can even walk. Concentrating on the Moon allows us to move from crawling as we are doing now to walking. That's why I've always favoured the Moon first approach to BEO.

I think everyone misses that development of new vehicles is where the cost is. That's why musk wants to develop something big enough and with enough capabilities to eventually go to mars. Sure in between this vehicle will be great for all of the lesser targets. How is ITS to big for the moon? LEO? GEO? etc.

I think future development costs - including ITS, ongoing Raptor development, refinement, and production, etc. - are probably a huge factor in SpaceX doing this private lunar mission.

Funding for future developments will have to come from somewhere. There will always be a market for satellite launches, and they are investigating new opportunities there like their internet satellite constellation; however, a huge chunk of SpaceX's revenue has always been commercial cargo and commercial crew. ISS won't be in orbit forever. What will happen to that revenue stream when - in 2024, 2028, or whenever - the ISS support market is gone?

I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think anyone else does, either. Maybe ~10 years from now there will be a small-but-growing market for launching crew and cargo to support smaller, private space stations like the commercial stations and hotels Bigelow has been envisioning, private lunar orbit tourist trips, support for smaller, government-run national LEO laboratories (like the ISS), etc.

On the other hand, maybe some of that focus for government funded human spaceflight switches to the moon. It's hard to get a read on what, if any, real plans the Trump administration has for the space program at this point in time. If a return to the moon by NASA is emphasized, there could well be a place for commercial resupply and crew rotation, just like there is today with the ISS. If it does, a mission like this one demonstrates that SpaceX is capable of supporting such missions - missions that could help provide revenue to support Elon's other ambitions.

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Seems to me Elon is trying to soften the blow to NASA pride by giving them first shot at the mission. There's no advantage to insulting your main customer. Elon knows this is going to look bad for NASA, so he's giving them the courtesy of at least letting their astros be the ones to take the glory.

So I take the offer as being an attempt to placate NASA to the degree possible under the circumstances, not insult them further. I imagine pretty much any NASA astro would jump at the opportunity, if permitted.

I don't disagree, although I suspect there's more to it. With all the speculation about the new administration potentially looking to fund going back to the moon (hence Blue Origin and Bigelow lunar statements too) I think Elon is also trying to make clear that SpaceX would be very willing partners. Even to the extent of pushing back the private customers who have already paid substantial deposits.

That's why SpaceX announced this now.

[envy887]

When Elon Musk offered that NASA would have first call if they want to do the loop around the moon in Dragon, my first thought was this is adding insult to injury. The injury being that SpaceX goes first, the insult offering the seats to NASA.

Am I the only one who thought this?

Edit: I do not think SpaceX should have refrained from preparing and announcing the mission. It is something NASA will have to live with.

If NASA buys the seats the headline becomes "NASA returns to Moon" rather than "SpaceX sends tourists to Moon". From a PR perspective it's a "NASA mission", even though it's really a SpaceX mission.

I don't see the announcement or the mission as any actual injury to NASA. It's not like Congress is going to stop funding SLS/Orion anytime soon.

[Star One]

Seems to me Elon is trying to soften the blow to NASA pride by giving them first shot at the mission. There's no advantage to insulting your main customer. Elon knows this is going to look bad for NASA, so he's giving them the courtesy of at least letting their astros be the ones to take the glory.

So I take the offer as being an attempt to placate NASA to the degree possible under the circumstances, not insult them further. I imagine pretty much any NASA astro would jump at the opportunity, if permitted.

I don't disagree, although I suspect there's more to it. With all the speculation about the new administration potentially looking to fund going back to the moon (hence Blue Origin and Bigelow lunar statements too) I think Elon is also trying to make clear that SpaceX would be very willing partners. Even to the extent of pushing back the private customers who have already paid substantial deposits.

That's why SpaceX announced this now.

Couldn't they share the glory by putting a NASA astronaut in with the two tourists. I am sure this would be a reassuring move to both Space X & the tourists.

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Couldn't they share the glory by putting a NASA astronaut in with the two tourists. I am sure this would be a reassuring move to both Space X & the tourists.

Possibly, but that's a 50% increase in use of consumables and I wonder if 2 people is a sweet spot that means pretty much a standard Dragon 2 (designed for 7 people to LEO) can do the trip with minimal changes?

It's also possible that the two people actually don't want anyone else with them, although that's pure speculation.

[Kaputnik]

To a lot of the public, every rocket is a NASA rocket. And a few talking heads from NASA can genuinely point out how interlinked the Dragon 2 development is with NASA.

A second flight by non-NASA people would only become a PR issue if the media wanted to take that angle. It might get ignored. Look, for example, at the almost non existent coverage of the stratospheric balloon jump that happened not long after Baumgartner.

[rsdavis9]

BTW

Anybody know whether ITS could land on the moon and come back without any refueling?
How about with LEO refuelling before TLI?

[envy887]

BTW

Anybody know whether ITS could land on the moon and come back without any refueling?
How about with LEO refuelling before TLI?

Not direct. Yes, if refueled and they hit the specified performance. But that's OT here.

[bad_astra]

To a lot of the public, every rocket is a NASA rocket.

Not anymore. With new headlines about some kind of "new space race" if anything they'll be under the misunderstanding that SpaceX's work was done entirely without NASA involvement (commercial cargo/crew)

[bulkmail]

Does somebody have the numbers for:
- Falcon Heavy payload capacity (let's say in expendable mode, but better if values are available also for 1- and 3-cores reusable modes) to TLI, LLO, Lagrangian points Earth-Moon, Earth-Sun
- Dragon V2 weight
- Dragon V2 weight for consumables per manday

Can FH send crewed Dragon V2 in Moon orbit or to some of the other cis-lunar and flexible path locations?

[Space Ghost 1962]

"Having another customer for Dragon 2 besides CC is very important as a business."

I agree. There is a place where tourists could go in the near future, called "LEO". There is probably enough LEO tourism market to support SpaceX for a long time to come.

Agree.

However, and trust me on this, they are quite different categories of "customers", and the impact of this difference cannot be understated.

It puts certain countries into a bind. Like again take China - there are 4 I *personally know* that will easily do it, but the Chinese govt would want to have Chinese taikonauts on Chinese vehicles do it first.

Do you understand the strange situation this puts them into? And there are five other cases from other nationalities ... like this.

Extend this back to NASA.

Indeed.

Imagine it's one year from now, March 2018.  SpaceX has flow the Heavy, sent Dragon2 to the ISS robotically, performed the in-flight abort.  Maybe they fly a couple of cargo missions with D2.  However, NASA keeps pushing out the date for sending up the first crew to the ISS as they tweak the requirements and request more reviews and repetitions of previous tests.  (They's already had SpaceX add a fourth parachute and change from land to ocean landings.)

It's hard to discern the situation here - is CC behind on safety, is NASA "too safe"/dilatory ... is Congress pressing on NASA to "slow down"/starve CC to benefit a half-hearted Orion program cadence.

A scheduled flight around the moon would act somewhat as a limiter.  If NASA were to keep fussing with the plan, they risk having SpaceX fly the first "crewed" mission on their own. That would look pretty silly, being upstaged not just by Falcon Heavy vs SLS, but then with the commercial use of the NASA funded D2.  How will it look with great nations trailing a guy who started 15 years earlier with a couple of hundred million dollars?

Currently NASA is acting as if it won't happen - relying on "Elon time distortion". However, consider other factors are present. WH wants a "moon flight distraction", NASA/Congress don't have the "wiggle room" to comply, and there's this threat to whack budget severely. SX "white knight" effect is in play. Already a limiter.

Will draw attention to every SX "event", as tension builds around this extreme claim to beating all nations back to the Moon. As FH/D2 flies (and NASA gives up on accelerating HSF with EM-1), nationalism ambitions will ramp up.

Likely Orion and CC will all come under the public microscope. Comparisions will be made. Likely China will get very serious about LEO space tourism in a comical way. Russian "free return" will get a Zond-like faux redux as a "me too". Perhaps other players too.

If it were to launch ahead or near coincident with D2 crewed test flight, certain bet that NASA/others would be pressured to shell out such comparatively tiny funds to "follow on" with two astros "to pave the way" for EM-1/2 "rescoped" missions.

When Elon Musk offered that NASA would have first call if they want to do the loop around the moon in Dragon, my first thought was this is adding insult to injury. The injury being that SpaceX goes first, the insult offering the seats to NASA.

Am I the only one who thought this?

Edit: I do not think SpaceX should have refrained from preparing and announcing the mission. It is something NASA will have to live with.

Seems to me Elon is trying to soften the blow to NASA pride by giving them first shot at the mission. There's no advantage to insulting your main customer. Elon knows this is going to look bad for NASA, so he's giving them the courtesy of at least letting their astros be the ones to take the glory.

Yes. But he's also doing same to Congress. And giving them time to rescope EM 1/2.

So I take the offer as being an attempt to placate NASA to the degree possible under the circumstances, not insult them further. I imagine pretty much any NASA astro would jump at the opportunity, if permitted.

Hey it's training for cislunar flight ...

If you're a NASA astro, the real insult is that some rich guy/gal with no aerospace training got to go to the moon, instead of you or one of your astro buddies, because NASA management refused to pay a ridiculously low price (relative to an Apollo or SLS mission) for your ride.

OK. Quick question. What more does an astro do on SLS cislunar EM-1/2, that a passenger on D2 cislunar ... does?

[AncientU]

Seems to me Elon is trying to soften the blow to NASA pride by giving them first shot at the mission. There's no advantage to insulting your main customer. Elon knows this is going to look bad for NASA, so he's giving them the courtesy of at least letting their astros be the ones to take the glory.

So I take the offer as being an attempt to placate NASA to the degree possible under the circumstances, not insult them further. I imagine pretty much any NASA astro would jump at the opportunity, if permitted.

I don't disagree, although I suspect there's more to it. With all the speculation about the new administration potentially looking to fund going back to the moon (hence Blue Origin and Bigelow lunar statements too) I think Elon is also trying to make clear that SpaceX would be very willing partners. Even to the extent of pushing back the private customers who have already paid substantial deposits.

That's why SpaceX announced this now.

I think they announced it now so that:
1. They demonstrate that the private sector is a player for any return to the Moon, and
2. They don't want the new administration to get credit for the work they've done.

The opportunity to announce it when NASA is struggling with whether they can do their first manned Orion flight by 2020 emphasizes the first point a bit more dramatically.

'Insulting' or no, the one-upmanship began at the September reveal, which most disregarded as fantasy.

[LouScheffer]

When test pilots get killed in a aircraft crash, it is just treated as the price of aerospace progress and life moves on.  Astronaut(s) die in a spacecraft incident and everybody thinks that is the end of the world and progress should come to a halt because somebody might die.   

This is written several years after a crash of SpaceShip Two basically stopped that company dead in its tracks for a while.

This is my main worry about this program, as well.  Whenever there is an accident involving crew, progress stops for a long time.  Empirically, it seems that a crew loss stops progress for about 2 years (Apollo, Shuttle, SpaceShip One) whereas a loss of uncrewed mission stops for about 6 months (SpaceX, recent Russian failures, etc.). So each crew loss costs about 1.5 years of progress. 

Along these lines, though I would never ever wish anyone a war, there is something to be said for the attitude it fosters towards innovation.
*There is an obvious and explicit cost to inaction, in lives and property lost due to the status quo.  An idea that might improve the existing methods is much more likely to be tried, even when its odds of success are uncertain.
*There is not so much concern about who builds what.  If the best answer is a Centaur upper stage on the SpaceX booster, there'd be an adapter.
*There is more emphasis on the best (or quickest) solution.  Having a known method that works OK is not the barrier to development that it often is in peacetime.
*Development goes on in a parallel, not serially.  If you have an accident, keep flying while you work out the problem.  You risk another failure of the same type, but will also likely find unrelated problems that need to be addressed, without waiting for the first problem to be fixed.  Likewise, while learning to mass produce the model A, you develop the model B using the lessons learned so far, and do research on the model C.
*There is a chance for young but brilliant designers to get projects of the own, since many important projects must be in progress simultaneously.
*People just plain work harder, since they can see the consequences of their work directly.

The combination of these factors makes a huge difference.  Look at radar during WW-II for example.  From a research project to hundreds of designs in mass production in 4 years.  Or planes designed in months, and in production in a few months more.  Much faster than the boldest of the NewSpace companies, who by today's standards are often considered too far towards the fast-but-risky end of the spectrum.  As wartime shows, this spectrun extends much further than the portion we use today.

[Space Ghost 1962]

Bezos is more the one aiming to do the walking to the Moon.

Excuse me. Have asked this question. He says "cost effective cargo to lunar surface". Way different. Source - his remarks in January 2017.

Politely - please help me understand where you get this. Perhaps you intuit it? If so, ask him in public q&a or reddit AMA. Might not be as you think.

Key point - he's skeptical of funding broadly HSF vehicles. Including those to the surface of other bodies.

NB hydrolox landers he wants to do are very low TRL. Very helpful for lowering logistics costs ...

[Star One]

Bezos is more the one aiming to do the walking to the Moon.

Excuse me. Have asked this question. He says "cost effective cargo to lunar surface". Way different. Source - his remarks in January 2017.

Politely - please help me understand where you get this. Perhaps you intuit it? If so, ask him in public q&a or reddit AMA. Might not be as you think.

Key point - he's skeptical of funding broadly HSF vehicles. Including those to the surface of other bodies.

NB hydrolox landers he wants to do are very low TRL. Very helpful for lowering logistics costs ...

Have you watched the video interview with him I posted yesterday in the Blue Origin thread, if you haven't then I recommend you do?

[Oersted]

By the way, multiple people already died during SpaceShipTwo's development and testing, and the computer any hasn't folded.

People die climbing Everest. Or flying general aviation aircraft, but Cessna hasn't gone out of business.

Cessna only survives because of risk adversity. It has become prohibitively expensive to insure new general aviation designs which is why people are still flying around in those old crates...

[eric z]

  On page 2 of this thread I wrote that NASA should grab one of those seats Mr. Musk was offering. Seems like a few others agree. Though the past is in the past; cutting across factional lines, It would have been neat for NASA/SpaceX together to have announced the circumlunar flight to "Get the ball rolling in modern in-flight experience BEO, and as the continuation of the growing realization that 3P [public/private partnerships] will open up the Final Frontier Faster- This flight series, maybe 2 or 3?, will pave the way for more purely commercial activities, and BTW we've already got "tourists" ready to go!, and explorative/scientific research missions. The first flight will be crewed by one of NASA's top veterans, along with a professional SpaceX test-astronaut. NASA will, just as we are now showing on the ISS, always be open to working with companies, international partners, other government agencies such as NIH and NOAA and private figures to get us moving faster again in our quest to conquer Outer Space. SLS will continue its early check-out flights as planned , but we plan to update our schedule for the 2020s to create useful synergy between all our 3P assets."
  I'm sure someone could word this more articulately.
 

[punder]

I'll watch the mission, but this sort of thing benefits a very small number of people, and only for a short time.

Yes. Sort of like Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. Okay, a small bunch of investors got some cash out of it. Otherwise, the flight had no discernible affect on the advancement of aviation.

(Sorry, catching up, many pages behind. But this attitude just really puzzles me.)

[Space Ghost 1962]

Bezos is more the one aiming to do the walking to the Moon.

Excuse me. Have asked this question. He says "cost effective cargo to lunar surface". Way different. Source - his remarks in January 2017.

Politely - please help me understand where you get this. Perhaps you intuit it? If so, ask him in public q&a or reddit AMA. Might not be as you think.

Key point - he's skeptical of funding broadly HSF vehicles. Including those to the surface of other bodies.

NB hydrolox landers he wants to do are very low TRL. Very helpful for lowering logistics costs ...

Have you watched the video interview with him I posted yesterday in the Blue Origin thread, if you haven't then I recommend you do?

Just did. He's even more long winded than I am (my icon/name comes from people telling me I talk too long/much).

Talks of cargo delivery service, not HR. For human settlement. Hydrolox architecture.My point exactly.

And?

[Star One]

Bezos is more the one aiming to do the walking to the Moon.

Excuse me. Have asked this question. He says "cost effective cargo to lunar surface". Way different. Source - his remarks in January 2017.

Politely - please help me understand where you get this. Perhaps you intuit it? If so, ask him in public q&a or reddit AMA. Might not be as you think.

Key point - he's skeptical of funding broadly HSF vehicles. Including those to the surface of other bodies.

NB hydrolox landers he wants to do are very low TRL. Very helpful for lowering logistics costs ...

Have you watched the video interview with him I posted yesterday in the Blue Origin thread, if you haven't then I recommend you do?

Just did. He's even more long winded than I am (my icon/name comes from people telling me I talk too long/much).

Talks of cargo delivery service, not HR. For human settlement. Hydrolox architecture.My point exactly.

And?

Well you have to start somewhere don't you and that's where he's starting. Is there some reason you're so determined to put a negative spin on his plans rather than welcoming another player in this field?