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During a press conference at his company's Hawthorne, CA headquarters, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the first planned private passenger to travel into deep space and around the Moon. Yusaku Maezawa, a billionaire fashion entrepreneur and art collector, paid an undisclosed amount to become one of the first people to fly on a SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), with a target date of 2023. If the launch happens, he won't be going alone. Maezawa (aka "MZ") plans to invite at least six to eight artists to accompany him on a journey around the Moon. The passengers chosen may be painters, sculptors, musicians, fashion designers, dancers, film directors, architects, etc. and are intended to represent the Earth and participate in an art exhibition after returning to Earth. Musk himself has also been invited. The project is called #dearMoon.
Yusaku Maezawa approached SpaceX and made a contribution that will pay for a "non-trivial" amount of the BFR's development costs. During the Q&A, Musk estimated that the entire development of BFR would cost around $5 billion, or no less than $2 billion and no more than $10 billion. Other potential sources of funding for BFR development include SpaceX's top priority, Crew Dragon flights to the International Space Station (ISS), as well as satellite launches and Starlink satellite broadband service.
Maezawa (along with a guest) was a previously announced anonymous customer for a Falcon Heavy ride around the Moon. SpaceX currently has no plans to human-rate the Falcon Heavy. The switch from Falcon Heavy to BFR will substantially increase the maximum number of passengers and comfort level attainable on a nearly week-long mission, since the Crew Dragon 2 has a pressurized volume of just 10 m3, about 1% of the volume of the BFS.
Some changes have been made to the BFR's design. The height of the full rocket (spaceship and booster) will now be around 118 meters, from 106. Incidentally, the Space Launch System Block 2 Cargo will be 111.25 meters tall. The pressurized volume of the spaceship (BFS) portion was estimated at around 1,000-1,100 m3, greater than that of the ISS, and up from a previous estimate of 825 m3. The booster now has 3 prominent fins, two of which can rotate. The third does not move and has no aerodynamic function whatsoever; it serves as the third landing leg. One major motivating factor behind the redesign? Aesthetics, according to Musk. This is supposed to be the final iteration of the design in terms of broad architectural decisions.
Early in the presentation, BFR's payload capacity to low-Earth orbit and other destinations (with in-orbit refueling) was listed as "over 100" metric tons with full reuse, down from the 150 metric tons that has been talked about since 2017. This appears to be due in part to the use of seven sea-level Raptor engines on the BFS. Two of the rear cargo sections around these engines could be removed and the engines can be switched out for vacuum Raptor engines in another iteration of BFS, which would presumably have a higher payload capacity. Two, and possibly as many as four, of the seven engines can fail without compromising the BFS's ability to land.
"Grasshopper"-style vertical takeoff and landing tests are still planned for 2019, at the company's South Texas Launch Site near Brownsville, TX. High velocity flights and tests of the booster are planned for 2020. The first orbital flights could happen around 2021, and may launch from a floating platform. Musk indicated that there would be several uncrewed tests of the BFR before any humans are sent on it, including an uncrewed flight around the Moon.
Due to the low amount of payload on a cislunar joyride, passengers may only have to experience 2.5-3 g during ascent, instead of around 5 g. Depending on how the BFS returns to Earth, passengers could experience 3 g or 6 g on re-entry. Although the exact mission profile has not yet been decided, the BFS will probably "skim" the surface of the Moon before returning to a higher altitude, so that the passengers can get a much closer look at the Moon's surface than what is portrayed in the current flight plan. The total flight time is estimated at just over 5 days and 23 hours, with around 31 hours spent in the vicinity of the Moon (the flyby).
SpaceX press conference (1h11m44s).
Also at Ars Technica, The Verge (alt), and Fox News.
Previously: SpaceX Plans to Fly a Passenger Around the Moon Using BFR
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday September 18 2018, @02:08PM (5 children)
Big discussion of the design over here: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/9gqd4g/change_in_bfs_design/ [reddit.com]
Didn't check that subreddit until a few minutes ago, obviously it's exploding.
The mass-volume tradeoff for this new design seems particularly well-suited for this crewed Moon trip and any crewed Mars trip. You want more room for each astronaut and aren't going to fill up the vehicle with the maximum number of tons.
The rear/aft cargo segments around the BFS engines could be used to release Starlink satellites, or maybe CubeSats.
It's too bad that most of the reporters at the press conference felt the need to ask the same questions about cost over and over. If it wasn't for Everyday Astronaut [everydayastronaut.com] being there, there would have been much less clarification about the design.
Also about the cost, some are saying that 80% of the BFR dev costs are going to be payroll (with existing engineers switched from Crew Dragon, etc. soon), so the material/testing costs are much closer to $1 billion. And even if NASA or the Air Force aren't pitching in any money now, they probably will want to at some point, even if it's not a development grant but a launch contract (like the one that saved SpaceX from dying).
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 18 2018, @05:03PM (4 children)
Indeed, and why give Reddit all the fun. From various video clips it sounds like some of the big tradeoffs and other details are:
LEO payload reduced from 150t to 100t
Cargo volume increased from 825m^3 to 1000m^3
Removal of vacuum engines, increased number of total engines to 7
Ring of 6 cargo pods around the engine bells, totaling 88m^3 of additional capacity (supposedly can be replaced with 3 vacuum engines if needed)
Addition of mobile fins
Landing on the fins/legs instead of the base
Total height increased from 109m to 118m
More info? Corrections? Thoughts?
The weight-for-volume tradeoff is interesting - it seems that it's now planned to contain more pressurized volume than the ISS. It would seem to be especially relevant to passenger flights (e.g. tourism, Mars colonization) and transporting space station modules to orbit. I wonder if the Bigelow 2000(?)m^3 inflatable habitat would fit in the expanded bay - I seem to recall it was a bit too large for the old design.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 18 2018, @05:15PM (3 children)
I'm not sure that the removal of the cargo pods would allow the "addition" of 3 vacuum engines. I thought I heard that some of the sea-level engines would have to be swapped out.
Specs of the Raptor engine, such as the specific impulse and chamber pressure, appear to have been improved.
Previous height was 106 meters, not 109 meters.
Bigelow's BA 2100 [wikipedia.org] which is what you're referring to, has a pressurized volume of 2,250 m3 and an uncertain mass of 65 to 70 or even 100 tons. BA 2100 is just a concept right now, so maybe Bigelow could size something in its class to fit BFR or... SLS?
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 18 2018, @05:42PM (2 children)
You might be right - I only came across one second-hand reference to Musk (supposedly) describing the vacuum engine/cargo ring swap. Would love to find a definitive reference. I could even see simply replacing the ring with a secondary bell being possibly viable, akin to your initial thoughts in the previous thread, before the nature of the ring was established.
Thanks, I looked for it, but without the 100 of B2100 I was coming up blank.
My impression was that the 2100 was well along in design, if not in production - it would seem to serve everyone involved if it could be ready for launch in either vehicle soon after the BFR and/or SLS is ready to carry it. Once you have a protective shell, the interior is much easier to outfit in orbit.
There's also the possibility that, with that much volume, BFRs could be retired to serve as space stations in their own right. I would imagine refurbishing windows, docking rings, etc. would be considerably easier than doing the same for the more active parts. And of course the fuel and oxygen tanks offer additional potential living volume with only moderate in-orbit retooling - especially if most of the prep-work was done on Earth - e.g. bond hatches and "hallways" between the tanks and cargo bay, so you need only cut out "doorways" along the dotted lines to complete the conversion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday September 18 2018, @06:20PM (1 child)
Passenger BFSs are intended to have a "closed-loop" life support system, due to targeting destinations that are in deep space, including Mars. If that is the case, it could definitely be a good space station, or at least a healthy-sized component of one. Heck, if you detected a problem with your BFS that could be catastrophic for re-entry, maybe you could just leave it at the ISS or LOP-G indefinitely, to be used as large living quarters or storage.
B330 [wikipedia.org] is the Bigelow module that is closer to being realized.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 18 2018, @07:17PM
Excellent point about re-entry critical flaws.
As for the B330... I imagine it will be rather difficult for anyone to care about when you can launch a much larger (and probably cheaper) rigid module fully assembled within the BFR's cargo bay. I think they largely missed the boat with that one - their technology is just getting proven on the ISS, and along comes much bigger rockets that render their mainline module irrelevant. It certainly seems like they were banking on even the SLS taking a lot longer than planned.
Or, perhaps it really is just an intermediate tech demo itself. Might prove useful on the moon though, where unloading size could be a significant hurdle.
I'm trying to imagine how large modules would even be unloaded from the BFR - Musk showed a crane sticking out a side hatch in his lunar/martian mockups - and that's great for human-scale cargo, but to unload even a B330 you're going to have to open the main hatch (Maybe doable under Moon gravity?) and presumably have a much larger crane as part of the payload. Having a sufficiently large crane on the Moon would be incredibly handy - but getting it there would be a challenge. I mean I suppose you could just unload a giant "erector set" boom and assemble it by hand - but that's probably weeks or months of assembly. Though I suppose if you just leave a passenger rocket standing nearby as a habitat until the crane is built so you can unload your proper habitat... Hmm, or perhaps just use small rockets and design the cargo bay to survive their firing. You could even extend 2-3 of them outside the BFR to lift the cargo - Musk did mention that several F1 rockets would fit in the cargo bay, so existing technology could potentially be harnessed. It's not like you have far to go - just lift it up and out of the ship, travel a short distance horizontally, and land gently enough not to break anything. Not ideal, but it could serve to at least get a proper grane down to the ground.