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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."
"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."
Can't have the masses finding out the Earth is flat.
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.
Bruce Perens.