SpaceX to fly two space tourists around the moon in 2018

[OnlinePoker]

Source: CNN

Two thrill seekers are paying SpaceX to make a trip around the moon next year.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Monday afternoon that the space tourists had already placed a significant deposit for the trip. The travelers will undergo fitness tests and begin training later this year.

"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," SpaceX said in a blog post.

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/27/technology/spacex-moon-tourism/index.html?adkey=bn

[Brother Buzz]

1. Oh man, imagine the frequent flyer miles!

[PoliticAverse]

2. I hope they make sure the return ticket is refundable. n/t

[MedusaX]

3. ICE / CBP

ICE / CBP agents will meet them as they exit the craft... to make sure none of those
extra- terrorist-ial aliens are trying to sneak in from space.....

[metalbot]

16. Actually, they will

You can find Neil Armstrong's custom declaration online.

http://www.space.com/7044-moon-apollo-astronauts-customs.html

[lagomorph777]

25. That's an awesome find.

The line for "Any other condition on board which may lead to the spread of disease" is filled in "To be determined." Creepy!

[Trust Buster]

4. Question: Who will indemnify this new industry ?

Answer: Like the nuclear industry, you and I, the taxpayer. That's who. Feel better now ?

[eggplant]

15. How exactly would the taxpayers be on the hook for this?

We aren't even on the hook for regular launches for things like satellites. The industry self-funds its own insurance for this purpose.

[WheelWalker]

5. There's a sucker born every minute. nt

[keithbvadu2]

6. I'm going to live vicariously through their adventure.

I'm going to live vicariously through their adventure.

Happy Trails to you.

[calimary]

7. Jealous!!!!

[C Moon]

8. Sounds pretty cool to me. Gotta have a load of money, though.

[lagomorph777]

26. It's only available to billionaires.

I say we load up as many of them as possible, then arrange for a small malfunction in the oxygen stirrer....

[LisaM]

9. They're not taking my hopes and dreams.

There are times I don't mind watching the 1% exercise their privilege and do wild, escapist things.

This is not one of those times.

[TeamPooka]

10. Good luck with that. Space travel is still too dangerous to become a for-profit business.

This is the company still crashing rockets on landing as of last June.

[LudwigPastorius]

11. So, it will only have taken 50 years to get back to where we were in 1968.

I was crushed when I realized, as a teen a few years after the Apollo program, that the primary motivation for undertaking that amazing endeavor was not the advancement of human knowledge or the exploration of our species' unfathomable place in a vast universe, but was simply because we were scared shitless that the Soviets were going to get there first.

Part of me died that day.

[PSPS]

12. Under-taxed billionaires building circus rides for their buddies.

[snort]

13. Ready for the first civilian deaths in space.

Musk is stupid for trying to push this too quickly. But what do I know?

[caraher]

18. I agree

Has Musk flown even a single human into near-Earth orbit? And he proposes this jaunt for sometime in the next 2 years? The odds of losing the tourists seem pretty high (even a few percent is what I'd consider high, which is about what the odds of a fatal Space Shuttle flight turned out to be).

[SFnomad]

20. How soon we forget ....

Christa McAuliffe, the first Teacher in Space.

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aviationspace/fl/Christa-McAuliffe.htm

Christa McAuliffe was a civilian mission specialist aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle, and died with the rest of the seven member crew when Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986.

[bananas]

14. Yay! On the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 8!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

Apollo 8, the second manned mission in the United States Apollo space program, was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, orbit it and return safely to Earth. The three-astronaut crew—Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders—became the first men to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first to see Earth as a whole planet, the first to directly see the far side of the Moon, and then the first to witness Earthrise. The 1968 mission, the third flight of the Saturn V rocket and that rocket's first manned launch, was also the first manned launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The mission was originally planned as Apollo 9, to be performed in early 1969 as the second test of the complete Apollo spacecraft, including the Lunar Module and the Command/Service Module in an elliptical medium Earth orbit. But when the Lunar Module proved unready to make its first test in a lower Earth orbit in December 1968, it was decided in August to fly Apollo 8 in December as a more ambitious lunar orbital flight without the Lunar Module. This meant Borman's crew was scheduled to fly two to three months sooner than originally planned, leaving them a shorter time for training and preparation, thus placing more demands than usual on their time and discipline.

Apollo 8 took three days to travel to the Moon. It orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast where they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their spacecraft splashed down in the Northern Pacific Ocean. The crew was named Time magazine's "Men of the Year" for 1968 upon their return.

<snip>

[longship]

21. The riskiest human occupied space mission ever.

It all depended on one rocket whether they would get stranded in lunar orbit. If it doesn't light up, they aren't returning. It was a maneuver that was yet untested.

[Corgigal]

17. Tom Hanks?

I hope not, but I'm sure he could afford it. He certainly loves space and I watch his mini series on HBO several years back.

Time will tell.

[hunter]

19. My opinion is pretty similar to this:

Actually, SpaceX, We Shouldn’t Go to the Moon

Claire McNear
Staff Writer, The Ringer
Feb 27

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s live-action Richie Rich cosplay production, is going to send people to the moon.

Well, not to the moon, exactly, but around it; on Monday, the company announced that it will send two paying passengers on a circumlunar trip in late 2018. No one has been to the Moon since 1972, when NASA’s last manned mission there, Apollo 17, departed. SpaceX, whose planned Mars mission was just delayed another two years to 2020, is fairly transparently doing this as a PR stunt — Musk said Monday that he hoped the lunar trip would “[get] the world really excited about sending people into deep space again” — but it is reasonable to think that an actual manned lunar touchdown could be a next step. “How wonderful!,” you might be thinking: After all, a normal person might ask, what are we doing here in the Space Age — 60 years into the Space Age — without actually venturing into space?

I have a different question. It is one you might not like, but here it goes: Why in God’s name are we trying to go to the moon?

--more--

https://theringer.com/spacex-elon-musk-dont-go-to-the-moon-9e7972e73925

My grandfather was one of the engineers on the Apollo Project. Bits of metal, parts of machines he made, took men to the moon and back. He was an Army Air Force officer in World War II but his contribution to the Apollo Project was the work he was most proud of.

Nevertheless I think we learned what we needed to know about human space travel from the Apollo Project, and it's that space beyond low earth orbit is a very hostile environment for human beings. Human technology has progressed to the point that there's no good reason for us to visit space beyond low earth orbit in person. I'm a very enthusiastic supporter of robotic space exploration, and my enthusiasm will only increase as our robots become smarter and more capable.

If we humans actually get our shit together and survive all these man-made catastrophes we face, it will be our intellectual children who will be exploring space -- robots or genetically engineered creatures who can walk around naked in very harsh environments like the surface of Mars, Titan, and all the other interesting places of this solar system.

Maybe these explorers, when they are well established in space, will be fond enough of us fragile Homo sapiens to take a few of us along for the ride, like fish in an aquarium, so we may watch them at work through the glass.

My excitement about space exploration doesn't require any humans actually go there in person, and I'm absolutely certain I'll never volunteer to go on such a joyride.

Looking beyond that, and even as a fan of Star Trek, I suspect faster-than-light travel doesn't exist in this universe, for the same reasons time travel doesn't exist. This universe has probably spawned many sentient, intelligent beings (there are several species on earth alone, creatures we humans haven't yet managed to exterminate) but as these beings become much more technically sophisticated than we are now, it's likely they retreat into universes of their own making, or aspects of this universe that are entirely invisible to us.

[snooper2]

23. Like 7 billion people on the planet, we have plenty of spares if something happens in space

[hunter]

28. Fine, so long as it's not taking resources away from actual scientific exploration.

I've got an insanely self-destructive streak in me, literally danger-to-self-and-others at times, a kind of self-medication for grave depression and psychosis. It's been my good fortune that I've never had a billionaire around encouraging my madness. My adventures and misadventures have been pretty down-to-earth; falling off rocks, being hammered by giant surf, wandering around the desert, riding a motorcycle at very high speeds under a full moon with the lights off, trespassing into very dangerous places... At my worst I'm selfish, I pretend that I'm only putting myself in danger. But that's not true. It's always possible that someone could come to harm trying to rescue me, and it's absolutely true I have friends and family who would grieve if I didn't survive.

I'm not going to deny agency to anyone who wants to be flung around the moon in an exquisite display of pyrotechnics, the very best outcome being they return to earth subtly scarred by hard radiation, not anymore than I'd tell world class surfers to avoid the big waves. It's their life... or death.

But I don't think the death-in-space of people who had too much money and not much sense will do anything to enhance the public perception of scientific space exploration. They will have died not only in vain, but in vanity.

[snooper2]

29. Well, it is probably safer than this

Maybe you can hear better but I swear this Russian dude at the end says "idiot"

[lagomorph777]

27. I love robotic exploration too. But what about expansion of the use of space?

Examples include asteroid mining, or asteroid defense, or setting up a backup plan in case we fry this planet. Can we do those things without people?

[hunter]

30. Yes, without people. "Life Support" for humans is excess baggage.

Very sophisticated robots and artificial intelligence can do all those things.

We've already got the robotic capability, and work is progressing rapidly on the brains.

wikipedia

[packman]

22. 5 days to moon, 5 days back

In a relatively tiny craft. SPACE MADNESS -

[MatthewStLouis]

24. Please, god, let it be Trump.

They can switch him to manual once he's in safely in space. Hehe.

The trip sounds amazing and if I felt most of my life goals were actualized, I'd consider going for it. But..., I'd be afraid some thrusters would give out and I'd end up dying in lunar orbit... Dying on reentry wouldn't be quite as bad... Anyway, what a story, if I actually made it back!