SpaceX plans to fly two to the moon in ‘18
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX plans to fly two people to the moon next year, a feat not attempted since NASA’s Apollo heyday nearly half a century ago.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, announced the ambitious plan for a private enterprise moonshot yesterday.
Two people who know one another approached the company about sending them on a weeklong flight just beyond the moon, according to Musk. He won’t identify the pair or the price tag. But they’ve already paid a “significant” deposit, he noted.
Musk said SpaceX is on track to launch astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in mid2018. The moon mission would follow about six months later, by the end of the year under the current schedule, using a Dragon crew capsule and a Falcon heavy rocket.
The moon mission is designed to be autonomous — unless something goes wrong, Musk said.
“I think they are entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here,” Musk said during a telephone news conference.
“They’re certainly not naive, and we’ll do everything we can to minimize that risk, but it’s not zero,” added Musk, noting that the pair will receive “extensive” training.
Musk said he does not have permission to release the passengers’ names, and he was hesitant to even say if they were men, women or even pilots. He just said, “It’s nobody from Hollywood.”
The passengers would make a long loop around the moon — 240,000 miles from Earth — skimming the lunar surface and then going well beyond, perhaps 300,000 or 400,000 miles altogether. The mission won’t involve a lunar landing, according to Musk.