So, hmm, we wants to send people around the moon, a year and a half from now, with a rocket he never tested and with a capsule that never flew?
I expect half of the directors of SpaceX to resign in the next two days...
They are going to test the rocket later this year, and the rocket is based on the F9 design, so nothing done from scratch. The crew capsule is also just an enhancement of the capsule which travelled to the ISS and back again several times. It also is going to be tested with flights to the ISS before this planned moon mission. Once you exchange the F9 for the F9 Heavy, going to the moon is not really anyhow more difficult than going to the ISS. You need a bigger launch speed, but then you orbit the Moon and return back. A Moon landing however would be a distinctively different effort.
Ok, let's put it like this: how much are you willing to bet that they'll be sending two passengers around the Moon on board of Falcon Heavy/ Dragon 2 next year?
Onto next year? Not too much. Schedules slip, and space flight schedules even slip faster. But if not 2018, 2019 would be very likely. The next big milestone is the F9 Heavy flight. Other than that, they first have to fly a manned mission to the ISS first. Once that has been achieved, flying around the moon is not especially difficult, probably technically even easier than to the ISS, as less precision is required.
One was a ground incident that wouldn't have had people nearby even with a manned mission, and the other would have saved its passengers with the abort system.
And if people are willing to pay the money and take the risk, why not?
> One was a ground incident that wouldn't have had people nearby even with a manned mission, and the other would have saved its passengers with the abort system.
Not sure how that would mitigate the risk of explody Space-X rockets?
Exactly the way it was described. People are on board the rocket for the minimal amount of time before launch and not during the most risky operations in order to mitigate the risk of explosion. While the people are on board the rocket there are systems in place to increase their chances of escape, again mitigating the risk.
e: I realize you are saying none of this reduces the risk of the rocket exploding but at some point that doesn't matter because there's never going to be an absolute guarantee. The mitigation of risk that the rocket explodes is the further test flights the new rocket will complete before a manned mission to the moon.
Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.
> Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.
Uh no.. they're losing MORE rockets now than before, mostly because the rockets are getting bigger and more powerful - and they have the Heavy versions coming.
Consider that 2 of their last 13 rockets exploded.. that's not a good track record. Compare that to ULA, which hasn't had an explosion over 100 Atlas/Delta launches.
I don't think either of the explosions were related to the rockets getting bigger or more powerful. The CRS-7 failure would have happened on any version of the Falcon 9. It happened on that particular one because that one happened to have a defective strut. The AMOS-6 explosion happened because of their experiments with supercooled propellants.
Two losses in two years is a lot better than the very early days when they lost their first three Falcon 1s in a row, but worse than the early years of Falcon 9 where the only failure was a single engine out that didn't hurt the primary payload, and is certainly not a good track record overall.
The cold war? A national effort? Dead crews during the project?
I mean, I'm half joking, I believe that it is a possible objective, as much as it is possible to manufacture 500k Model 3s a year.. next year. Possible, but a monumental effort and something on which Musk strongly disagrees even with the top managers in his own companies.
The space ship is already being developed for the Commercial Crew program. The rocket is a new rocket but with the same engines and the same upper stage.
This does not seem so impossible. A couple of delays will happen, but all in all, there is no fundamental problem.
I agree, there is no fundamental problem. But that couple of delays will bring the actual date much further away than "late next year". I'm sure Elon Musk is capable of great things, it's just that he's very obviously squeezing the people in his companies to the limits and beyond, by publicly announcing objectives that are just about possible, provided that his employees will work day and night for entire years.
I simply don't understand why people are always up in arms about his companies being so bad with their employees. Lots of companies push people to do more ours. God knows, I have worked insane hours for far worse reasons.
Plus the actual evidence for Elons companies being far worse then anybody else is not really there.
Plus, its not like all those educated people that work at SpaceX would live in the gutter if they can't do the job.
That's a completely different matter, I just meant to say that Elon Musk's estimates are often extremely optimistic.
You know (if you're a developer) when you're working on a very exciting piece of code that will do wonderful stuff, and you have clear in your head what you're doing and how to do it, and think "it'll take me an hour, can't wait to see it working" and then at 4 AM you're still there, always in the same state of mind, with half of your brain asleep and the other half still perfectly focused on the result? Yep, I think that's Elon Musk. Still in the splendour of his early twenties :)
Musk's #1 goal from the beginning is to put a lot of people on Mars, and do it in a rather short time (per human-history scale). We're talking a guy who literally invented PayPal just to make enough money to really get the project started. His other endeavors are as well, while laudable in their own right, really just ways of accumulating the resources to achieve that goal.
Go read Musk's biography at WaitButWhy.com - and you'll see that summarizing it into a two-line post is difficult. Suffice to say it all serves the goal of colonizing Mars.
