Space tourists bound for Moon next year
UNITED STATES: Spacex plans to launch two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the Moon next year, using a spaceship under development for Nasa astronauts and a heavy-lift rocket yet to be flown.
The launch of the first privately funded tourist flight beyond the orbit of the International Space Station was tentatively targeted for late 2018, Space Exploration Technologies chief executive Elon Musk announced yesterday.
Musk declined to identify the customers or say how much they would pay to fly on the week-long mission, except to say that they were ’’nobody from Hollywood’’.
He also said the two prospective space tourists, who knew each other, had put down a ‘‘substantial’’ deposit and would undergo ‘‘extensive training before going on the mission’’.
‘‘I think there’s a market for one or two of these per year,’’ he said, estimating that space tourist fares charged by Spacex could eventually contribute 10 to 20 per cent of the company’s revenue.
The plans call for Spacex’s twoperson lunar venture to fly 480,000 to 640,000 kilometres from Earth past the Moon before Earth’s gravity pulls the spacecraft back into the atmosphere for a parachute landing.
The mission trajectory would be similar to that of Nasa’s 1968 Apollo 8 mission beyond the Moon and back.
Musk also said that if Nasa decided it wanted to be first in line for a lunar flyby mission, the US space agency would take priority.
At the behest of the Trump administration, Nasa is conducting a study to assess the safety risks, costs and potential benefits of letting astronauts fly on the debut test flight of its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. That mission is currently planned to be uncrewed and scheduled to launch in late 2018.
Musk said the privately funded Moon expedition would take place after his California-based company began flying crew to the ISS for Nasa. The agency is hoping that these flights will begin by late 2018.
Spacex’s own Falcon heavy rocket, which Musk wants to use for the lunar tourist mission, is scheduled to make a debut test flight later this year.
Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla, said missions around the Moon could provide practice for eventual human flights to Mars, the long-term goal of Spacex.
Except for necessary communications upgrades, the Dragon spaceship being developed by Spacex for Nasa astronauts was well suited for lunar flyby missions, Musk added.
Spacex joins a growing list of companies developing commercial passenger spaceflight services. Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is testing a six-passenger, two-pilot spaceship to carry paying customers about 100km above Earth, high enough to experience brief microgravity and see the planet’s curvature against the blackness of space. Tickets cost US$250,000 (NZ$348,000) each.
Spacex has a US$10 billion (NZ$14B) backlog of about 70 missions for Nasa and commercial customers. - Reuters