SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com)

SpaceX will reportedly no longer be sending a pair of space tourists to circle the moon this year. The flight was scheduled for late 2018, but has been delayed, according to The Wall Street Journal. The reason for the delay is unclear. CNET reports: The flight was announced in February 2017, with SpaceX saying that two unidentified private citizens had put down a "significant deposit" for the trip and that other flight teams had expressed interest in taking a similar journey. The plan was for the tourists to fly on a Dragon Crew spacecraft launched from Earth by a Falcon Heavy rocket.

"SpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals on a trip around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers," company spokesman James Gleeson wrote in a statement. "Private spaceflight missions, including a trip around the moon, present an opportunity for humans to return to deep space and to travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them, which is of course an important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal to help make humanity multi-planetary."

Comments

SpaceX has other priorities right now

[Bruce Perens]

Human-qualifying the Falcon Heavy, which would be necessary for tourist flights around the moon, isn't a priority for SpaceX. They're pretty much through with Falcon-9 engineering. Now they will make the Dragon 2 work, but their main direction is to eventually replace Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 heavy with a much larger methane and liquid oxygen rocket which is as powerful as Falcon Heavy with just one "stick" rather than three.

There's a lot to be done between here and there, and every rocket engineering project has major risk, but this will potentially be a much more practical path to human space exploration than the SLS system which is an albatross around NASA's neck IMO and exists mainly as a pork-barrel jobs program.

In fairness to NASA and congress, we didn't know that SpaceX would be this successful when SLS was approved.

Re:SpaceX has other priorities right now

[DanDD]

No NASA rating is needed for SpaceX to fly humans anywhere in any of their rockets, unless those humans include NASA astronauts. However, NASA may get snippy and not allow any of their launch facilities for a SpaceX 'experimental' rocket, depending on the details of their lease agreement. If SpaceX were to have their own private launch facilities, then they'd have no significant restrictions.

The short version is that SpaceX only needs to file a flight plan to 60,000 feet and man their rocket with an IFR rated 'pilot' and any other 'essential' crew. Above 60,000 feet is class 'E' airspace. The 'experimental rocket' pilot could simply cancel their IFR flight plan above 60,000 and continue 'flying'. The minor details would be transponder requirements and potentially RVSM certification, which is rather humorous.

References:
Instrument Flight Rules
US Airspace diagram

Re:Waiting on NASA

[Bruce Perens]

We should have spent the first decade pouring billions into better computers, better alloys, better robotics, better polymers, etc. before shooting for the moon.

And Ferdinand Magellan should have waited for inertial navigation.

Of course, that's silly. A good deal of technology was developed for Apollo, including the integrated circuit. But you could say the same thing today - that we need to develop better technology before we should consider such a mission - that you could have said in 1960. At some point you have to go and that generally happens as soon as it's first possible.

Re:No

[Immerman]

Unfortunately "survival colonies" scattered around earth are poor protection against many of the most likely ends of civilization: super plague (GMO or otherwise, affecting humans or staple crops), nuclear warfare, or even sufficiently severe ecosystem collapse. Sure, they *could* be sealed ecosystems deep underground with no contact with the outside world - but what sort of sorry nutjob is going to lock themselves away from the world on the off-chance that it all comes tumbling down so fast that locking the doors after the fact might be too late?

Besides which preserving the human race is one of those extreme-long-term secondary visions anyway. So long as we live on only one planet, sooner or later something *will* kill us. Our exploding sun if nothing else. The real goal is to expand into new challenges and frontiers. Have elbow room to live the way people were meant to live - whatever that happens to mean to you. Frontiers have been good to our species, but we've pretty much filled them all up on Earth. Space offers the promise of an unfillable frontier - an endless expanse in which dreamers and malcontents can try to find their land of milk and honey. It offers both a pressure relief valve for society, and fertile ground for our adventurers - a kind of individual that has historically enriched our species in many, not always expected, ways.

Re:I'm shocked

[gnick]

...but you think a way to get NOWHERE will have a market? Beyond novelty?

Nearly every vacation I've ever taken has ended in the same place it started. Sometimes those trips are just to go take in a view. People go to the Grand Canyon & Carlsbad Caverns all the time and they're just big holes in the ground. Why is making a trip to see one of those so different than wanting to see the Earth from a distance?