SpaceX plans to send two civilians around the moon next year

SpaceX plans to send two civilians around the moon next year

SpaceX just announced a plan for beginning the era of space tourism: in late 2018, the space travel company plans to send two private citizens around the moon and back again. “Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration,” said a SpaceX press release. But they’ll also be driven by lots and lots of money.

The two individuals, whose names were not released, will be paying an also-undisclosed but “significant” amount of money to be the first civilians to circle the moon. Nobody has completed, or even attempted, this journey since Apollo 13 in 1970.

SpaceX plans to launch them aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon Heavy rocket, neither of which have been tested in space yet. Given the fact that the spacecraft haven’t been fully tested yet, let alone vetted for humans, a crewed launch in 2018 seems like an optimistic timeline. Some observers are sceptical.

“It’s typical SpaceX bravado,” says space policy expert John Logsdon at George Washington University in Washington, DC. “This is basically a joyride…It doesn’t advance any exploration objectives, it doesn’t have any science value. It’s like a very high bungee jump.” But last year, when SpaceX announced plans to send a Dragon capsule to Mars by 2018, the mood was optimistic.“I wouldn’t put anything past these folks,” said Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe at the time.

Logsdon also points out that SpaceX has promised NASA a human-qualified spacecraft by early 2018 to take astronauts to the ISS, so the Dragon capsule should be ready for near-Earth orbit by then.