space race 2 : promise and reality
SpaceX to Fly Passengers On Private Trip Around the Moon in 2018(?)
SpaceX will fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon in 2018, the company's founder Elon Musk announced Monday (Feb. 27).
The
private spaceflight company will use its Falcon Heavy rocket to send
the two paying passengers into space aboard one of the company's Dragon spacecraft.
The two private citizens, who have not yet been named, approached
SpaceX about taking a trip around the moon, and have "already paid a
significant deposit" for the cost of the mission, according to a
statement from the company. The names of the two individuals will be
announced later, pending the result of initial health tests to ensure
their fitness for the mission, the statement said.
The two passengers will be the only people on board what is expected
to be about a weeklong trip around the moon, according to Musk, who
spoke with reporters during a phone conference today.
"This would
be a long loop around the moon … It would skim the surface of the moon,
go quite a bit further out into deep space and then loop back to Earth,"
Musk said during the teleconference. "So I'm guessing, distance-wise,
maybe 400,000 miles [about 650,000 kilometers]."
The moon flight is scheduled to launch after SpaceX flies NASA astronauts to
the International Space Station as a part of the Commercial Crew
Program. Right now, SpaceX is planning to make an uncrewed flight of its
crew-carrying Dragon spacecraft to the space station this year, and its
first crewed flights are expected to happen in mid-2018, according to
Musk. (However, a recent report suggests
that those dates may be pushed back.) That means the Falcon 9 and
Dragon crew capsule will be approved for human spaceflight by NASA
before the moon mission takes place.
NASA
intends to put a backup plan in place in the event that SpaceX and Boeing are not ready to fly humans to space in 2019,
according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
SpaceX and
Boeing are both building crew transportation systems
for NASA, as part
of the agency's Commercial Crew Program (CCP). Right now, SpaceX and Boeing are
both scheduled to have their crew transportation systems undergo a safety
certification process in the latter half of 2018. But the GAO report, released
Thursday (Feb. 16), outlined numerous reasons why the two companies may not be
able to meet that current schedule...
Since the
retirement of the space shuttle, NASA has relied on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the
space station, at about $70 million per seat.
https://outrunchange.com/2017/03/08/even-more-competition-in-the-wide-open-frontier-of-private-space-exploration/
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