SpaceX doesn’t have the capability yet. In this plan, they are depending on a spacecraft which will have its first flight in 2018, the Dragon 2. That’s because they need to be able to do a re-entry from the Moon, which is much faster than from LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Only the Dragon 2 has a thick enough aeroshell to handle that speed of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
They are also depending on the Falcon Heavy to launch it, a rocket that will fly for the first time perhaps in late 2017. The Falcon 9 “full thrust” can launch a Dragon 2 to LEO but not around the Moon. So it would be the first crewed flight on a Falcon Heavy, and one of its first flights ever of this rocket, if they do it on that timetable. Also they would have their first ever crewed flight into space, earlier the same year.
It depends on neither of those blowing up - as has happened to their unmanned rockets once each year for the last two years (Sept 1, 2016 and June 28, 2015). For instance if one of the early flights of the Falcon Heavy blows up, then that will delay things a lot and surely lead to questions of passenger safety.
They are also using a fueling procedure where they load the fuel after the astronauts are on board - something never done before with passengers, and there is some concern that it is less safe. The rocket can explode while the fuel is being loaded, and that’s what happened to one of their rockets last year (the explosion on Sept 1, 2016). If the fuel is already on board before the passengers, you have removed one of the risks that could happen. The passengers might be able to escape if the rocket explodes on the launchpad with them on board. SpaceX have a system that should do that, which also should be triggered automatically in the case of an explosion like that - but it is itself one more thing that could go wrong, and so far never tested with humans on board.
This is an essential part of their rocket design because they use fuel that has to be kept very cold (to increase its density for a higher performance). They can’t keep the fuel this cold for long after it is loaded. This makes it impossible to load the fuel hours in advance before the crew.
They are also depending on a life support system working for a week in space which has only ever been tested for that long on the ground. And there is no way to abort the mission back to Earth. This is the worst thing about it for me. If they have an Apollo 13 style failure of life support on the way out, then they will have to make do with whatever they have in their spaceship to try to fix it. SpaceX have had issues with quality control of their parts, so I think it’s not impossible that a vital part of their life support system fails in some way. If the carbon dioxide scrubbers stop working, for instance, the carbon dioxide build up would kill the crew on those time scales. Apollo 13 were able to use the attached lunar module as a “lifeboat”, but they will have no lifeboat.
There is no problem with life support going wrong in LEO, not minor things like the CO₂ scrubbers not working, as you can just abort back to Earth within a few hours of noticing the problem. But on this mission it could easily be several days before you can return. Such a tragedy would unfold very slowly. And there would be absolutely nothing that anyone on Earth could do about it except give them advice.
If they do this, I wouldn’t fly on it if you paid me a billion dollars for the ride. But I expect it will be delayed and delayed, as happens so often with SpaceX. Also the FAA will need to approve it for safety, and it doesn’t seem very safe, at least, not as they have outlined it. I don’t think it is “bluffing” but it is hugely optimistic, that they will be able to achieve so many ground breaking innovations so quickly, and that nothing will go wrong with any of them, and that they will all be completed on timetable and be passed as safe for flight. They often claim that they will be able to do things many years before they actually do. For instance they claimed the Falcon Heavy would be ready some years ago (first they said 2011, then late 2013 to 2014) and it is still not ready.
IN DETAIL
I wish I could be more positive as someone who is very keen on humans in space, and to the Moon especially. But like Nick's answer - if you paid me a billion dollars I wouldn’t fly on that flight.
The announcement from SpaceX says that they will do it after human crewed spaceflights to the ISS - so it’s not going to be their first manned flight. So, it would depend on how many of those flights they do first.
“Once operational Crew Dragon missions are underway for NASA, SpaceX will launch the private mission on a journey to circumnavigate the moon and return to Earth.”
SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year
But according to this report, it’s very soon, first crewed flight to the ISS in the second quater of 2018, and then flight around the Moon later that year SpaceX to fly two tourists around Moon in 2018 - BBC News
And he says that the mission is risky himself - as quoted on the BBC site, the passengers
"are entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here. They're certainly not naive, and we'll do everything we can to minimise that risk, but it's not zero."
There are many issues with SpaceX for human spaceflight and with this mission particularly.
- There will be no lifeboat - all except the first Apollo mission to the Moon (Apollo 8) had the lunar module attached which acted as a lifeboat in an emergency on the journey out and saved the crew of Apollo 13. It’s a multi-day voyage without a lifeboat.
- There's the risk of explosion before they launch, with humans on board the spacecraft, as they load fuel after the passengers. It’s lead to some concern, because that's never been done with humans on board, and it caused their unmanned spacecraft to explode. They say they have fixed the issue that lead to that explosion - but what other issues are there which they haven't noticed and fixed? It will have a nearly instant crew abort system - something the Space Shuttle didn’t have, and Elon Musk says that the crew abort system would have saved the crew, but that’s also one more thing to go wrong and not yet tested with humans on board.
The fuel has to be loaded after the crew, in this way, immediately before launch because it has to be very cold as they need it higher density for a more fuel efficient launch. They can’t keep it that cold for long, so once it is loaded they have to launch right away.
- They have had issues with quality control, including an explosion at launch due to a strut that passed quality control and shouldn't.
- They have a history of unsafe practices such as engineers standing on components they shouldn't stand on.
- They have engineers working 80 hours a week.
- They continually change their design treating spaceship hardware much as you treat software.
Also their rockets keep exploding (Sept 1, 2016 and June 28, 2015). Surely they should have a few years of non exploding rockets before they send paying passengers, at least of whatever type of rocket they send the passengers on - and without continually changing the passenger rocket design during that period?
Elon Musk gave more details about his timeline here:
“Musk replied that SpaceX hopes to launch the first uncrewed Dragon 2 test flight to the ISS by the end of this year on the firm’s Falcon 9 rocket – almost identical to the rocket that just launched on Feb. 19 from pad 39A.
“That would be followed by crewed launch to the ISS around mid-2018 and the private Moonshot by the end of 2018.
“’The timeline is we expect to launch a human rated Dragon 2 on Falcon 9 by the end of this year, but without people on board just for the test flight to the space station’ Musk told Universe Today.”
“’Then about 6 months later we would fly with a NASA crew to the space station on Falcon 9/Dragon 2.’”
“And then about 6 months after that, assuming the schedule holds by end of next year, is when we would do the lunar orbit mission.””
The Falcon 9 Full Thrust can transfer only 8.3 tons to GTO and 4.02 tons to Mars (delta v 3.4 km/sec, similar to the delta v of LEO to translunar orbit of 3.1 km / sec) so it seems to be beyond its capability to send a Dragon 2 at 6.4 tons plus crew and supplies to Trans Lunar Injection.
This report suggests the Falcon 9 can now send 9.15 tons to GTO. But a 10% increase in performance is not enough, it needs more than a 50% increase in performance just to send the dry weight of the Dragon 2 to TLI without the crew or supplies.
So, it seems likely that they will use the Falcon Heavy. If so, it will be one of the first few flights of the Falcon Heavy, which is yet to launch, and the first ever crewed launch on the Falcon Heavy.
The re-entry speed from a spaceship returning from the Moon is also much higher than for re-entry from LEO. For instance Apollo 8, a similar mission, had a re-entry speed of 24,696 mph or about 11.04 km / sec. By comparison typical LEO re-entry speeds are around 17,000 mph or about 7.6 km / sec
Apollo 8 reentry, December 27, 1968 photographed from a US air Force KC-135A flown at 40,000 ft altitude
The Dragon heat-shield is not rated for a return from the Moon. So they have to fly the Dragon 2, which hasn’t flown yet. It will have a heatshield rated for this, but it has a dry mass (without crew or payload) of 6.4 tons and its heat shield is of course not yet tested.
They will have trained crew as well as the passengers. The Dragon 2 has 7 crew so with 2 paying, they could have 5 others. But I think there is a high risk of an explosion with them all dying on launch, or the life support failing and them all dying on the way to the Moon or on the way back.
Crewed Dragon Pad Abort Test in 2015. Elon Musk says it would have saved the crew in the event of the 2016 launch pad explosion, but it’s one more thing to go wrong and not yet tested with crew on board.
Also the life support will have to support the crew on a mission of several days. never tested that long in space before, and only used for the first time earlier that year in a mission to the ISS.
Though they can abort at launch or from LEO, there will be no chance at all of abort back to Earth from the far side of the Moon, or once they leave Earth, if something seriously goes wrong.
I just think they are nowhere near ready for human spaceflight at all, and to send an early test flight with humans aboard around the Moon so several days away from any chance to abort back to Earth... And to make that a flight with paying passengers...
The main issue with a loop around the Moon is that you are so much further away from rescue. Just 1% of CO2 in the atmosphere is enough to be hazardous to humans and it doesn't take that much mass of CO2 in a small spaceship to reach hazardous levels. That was the main issue for the Apollo 13 astronauts. They would have all died of carbon dioxide poisoning long before they could get back to Earth, if they hadn't found a way to improvise a CO2 scrubber.
It would be a case of the first ever long term test in space of its life support - and you do it with the crew going around the Moon! And the company concerned has had some previous issues with quality control of their components.
In general any issue that happens slowly over a period of hours or days is more hazardous in a multi-day misson. If you are traveling to the ISS you can always abort back to Earth within hours if such a situation arises. Another example of a problem of that nature would be a breach of the spacecraft hull, or damage of essential equipment through a micrometeorite or space debris. Or a failure of a part that works just fine for a few hours but then it fails, if it is a part that’s essential to life support.
It's different with test pilots. The Apollo crew were trained test pilots and jet fighter pilots, used to taking high risks. They knew what they were doing, and if they all died, as happened with Apollo 1- that's very different from an Apollo 1 or an Apollo 13 type disaster that doesn't have a happy ending with paying customers aboard.
Also Apollo did a step by step approach which turned up many problems that needed to be fixed.
There's bound to be an element of risk in space flight. But the attitude so far of the US, Russia and China has been to reduce that risk as much as possible, on the basis that it is hard enough anyway. With Apollo they did a step by step approach. Russia the same also. China too.
China could steal the limelight by sending humans around the Moon with a much higher chance of success than SpaceX as they already have the Long March 5, successfully launched in August 2016, capable of sending 8 tons on a lunar transfer orbit. They also have a fair bit of experience of humans in space including their own independent manned space station in LEO - but that is not their style, to do a spectacular but risky mission like that so soon.
The Americans could have built a big rocket and sent the astronauts to the Moon at an early stage, before Apollo 8, they could have attempted a landing on the Moon even. They had the Saturn V already and they knew how to do it in theory, but the technology wasn’t tested yet. They would have had a small chance of beating the Russians by a huge margin, but almost certainly everyone would have died. They showed the value of the step by step approach as they turned up numerous problems at every stage of the process which would have surely doomed the entire crew if they hadn’t done this approach (right up to Apollo 10 which did everything Apollo 11 did except land and turned up a problem that would have doomed the crew if they had tried to land).
And even with that careful step by step approach, they had all the crew die in the Apollo 1 explosion before they fully understood issues with oxygen atmospheres, and Apollo 13 came close to disaster and was only saved because of the lunar module which they could use as a “lifeboat” to supplement the systems in the command module.
SpaceX are planning to progress much faster than that, to do their best to minimize the risk and then go ahead with spectacular but dangerous programs. With that approach I think we are bound to get Space Shuttle type SpaceX accidents, probably sooner rather than later. The risk must surely be far higher than for the Space Shuttle. And surely more dangerous than Virgin Galactic who are at least doing many tests with test pilots first before sending the first passenger on a sub orbital hop. And of course Virgin Galactic also had one of their test pilots die in an accident. They aren’t attempting anything as dangerous and spectacular as this. Virgin Galactic sneaks in just one more SpaceShipTwo glide test to cap off 2016
We can do simulations of these missions in software - but that didn't stop the Virgin Galactic crash, or the SpaceX several explosions and failures. Our spacecraft are also much more complex than in the Apollo era - and a simulation is only good as far as it accurately matches what you built and launched. And simulations always involve approximations and sometimes those turn out to be significant and it leaves out something the authors of the software thought didn't matter which leads to a crash..
They are honest about the risks - but I don't know if their paying passengers will really evaluate that properly, they may treat it more like a scary fairground ride, and especially their relatives.
Or they may treat it like a Star Trek movie. The crew keep running huge risks, and at just the last second or minute they find a solution. But this is reality, not fiction, and Apollo 13 found a solution yes, it could almost have been a movie script the way it worked out, but the two Space Shuttle crew didn’t even know that they were about to die, and a new Apollo 13 could easily not have the same happy ending.
Also, the risk may well be much higher than they think. I wouldn't be surprised if it is as high as 25%?? If they do it as quickly as planned. Of course far too many intangibles to evaluate properly with a never tested spacecraft.
Also, if the Falcon Heavy doesn’t crash and the Dragon 2 works fine too, with two successful tests of each one first (say) - two successful launches don’t mean that a spacecraft is safe. If it has a 50/50 chance of failure with each launch, you could have two successful launches in a row with a probability of 25%.
The problem isn't so much, probabilities that they can predict. but the unknown, the mistakes, the flawed component, the failure of integration of something properly, the life support critical component, the onboard fire or explosion etc etc. So much has to go exactly right in the first ever manned mission after only one unmanned mission test. And they have a track record of things often going wrong, pushing the envelope and taking huge risks and gambling on them succeeding.
I have issues with Virgin Galactic too. They are following a slower more responsible approach to the testing, but they are somewhat playing down the risks and encouraging celebrities to fly with them who have no history of doing risky things like base jumping and can’t possibly really truly evaluate the risks, seems to me. Even with a VG suborbital hop, I think the risk will surely be higher than for the Space Shuttle and a lot higher than for the Soyuz missions to the ISS. Unless they do many tests before they fly. The big problem is the high cost of each test. If planes cost so much to fly each time, and could only be tested a few times before the first paying passengers go on board, then it would be just as hard to make a safe plane. I don’t think planes are intrinsically safer than spacecraft. It’s just that, at present anyway, it’s so much easier to test them.
Their announcement is here SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year - and more about it here: SpaceX reveals plan to send two private citizens around the moon in 2018
The Trump administration are also planning a similar risky mission - pushing back the first humans to use the Space Launch System (SLS) to the maiden flight of their rocket, with a journey around the Moon
Quoting from Human flight around the Moon: a worthy goal, but using the wrong vehicles, this is about the SLS flight but much of this also applies to the SpaceX idea:
“The most serious drawback to the proposed plan, however, is the added risk to the first crew. Flying crew on the first flight of a new launch vehicle is not without precedent. The first flight of the Space Shuttle had a crew. However, the shuttle only orbited the Earth and could quickly return if a problem developed. The Orion capsule, however, would embark on an flight around the Moon lasting more than a week. If a problem occurred at the wrong time, it would take days to get back to Earth.”
“And it’s not just that it is the first flight of the SLS. The Orion capsule has not been adequately flight-tested, either. The Orion capsule did make a single, short uncrewed flight in December 2014, when a Delta IV Heavy rocket boosted the capsule to a high Earth orbit for a five-hour mission. This flight was successful, but the life support system was not installed and the capsule only attained a velocity about 80% of that of a return from the Moon—not enough to fully test the heat shield. Not only that, but this flight lacked the service module that is the critical second component of the Orion spacecraft. The service module, which will be supplied by the European Space Agency, has never been flown and there are no plans to do so prior to the EM-1 mission.”
So, I have concerns with humans on the SLS too. Each mission is so very expensive, half a billion dollars per mission, that they won’t be able to do much testing. It’s not quite the same though because they won’t be doing commercial flights. Rather, it’s more like an early flight with test pilots on board. These are people doing a job they know is risky and which they have chosen as a career, testing spaceships. But it’s risky and could be a huge set back if that first flight is a disaster and they all die.
It is easy to say "take the risk" until the first crash. If they succeed then there will be those who cheer them on and say it’s brilliant. But sooner or later, encouraged by that success, they send more such flights. Then one of them crashes, and then they will once more get just about everyone saying they pushed too quickly too soon.
It’s so different from an uncrewed spaceflight. With uncrewed spaceflight this “gamble on success” has worked for SpaceX. Though they have had at least one occasion where a single failed flight would have been the end of their company (in 2008, Elon Musk says if the fourth SpaceX test flight had failed like the first three, that would have meant bankruptcy and the end of both SpaceX and Tesla). But I don’t think it is the right way to do human spaceflight, to do spectacular risky flights like this when you don’t have to.
Everything is in the timing.
For more about the SpaceX plans see SpaceX’s Private Lunar Mission in Work for Last Two Years; Other Opportunities on Horizon
See also Money Won't Save SpaceX's Moon Tourists If Something Goes Wrong
You might also be interested in the facebook group Case for Moon for Humans - Open Ended with Planetary Protection at its Core
This originates as my answers to two Quora questions: What are your opinions on the SpaceX ‘tourist flight around-the-Moon’ in 2018? and Does SpaceX have the capability to send people around the moon?
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