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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, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday September 18 2018, @04:13PM
A big part is probably first-mover advantage.
SpaceX was a serious project before any of the "competition" was much more than a hobby project. I suspect that's part of the reason Blue Origin targeted the suborbital tourist market rather than doing anything useful, they'd be nothing but an also-ran in that market. By the time they got off the ground SpaceX was well on their way to orbit. By the time their current rocket was undergoing serious test flights, SpaceX was already launching commercial payloads to orbit and was mastering the art of landing the first stage.
And once they went commercial, SpaceX had the advantage of being dramatically cheaper than any other launch options - they could undercut all other launch services while still maintaining huge profit margins to fund further development. The next commercial competition will have to be able to undercut SpaceX launch costs if they want to be able to use their profits to fund development, and that just doesn't look realistic for a rocket company just starting out. There was really only one window of opportunity for a cost-conscious company to undercut the globally political-pork-acclimated launch business.
Incidentally though, the Blue Origin looks an awful lot like their initial plans for a second stage rocket, so they may also have be positioning it as a second stage vehicle to launch atop a much more powerful first stage. That remains to be seen, but tourism would seem to be the only chance there is of operating a profitable launch business now that all the easy money has been taken out of the orbital launch market. Of course, if BFR manages to deliver on its goal of lower overall launch costs than the Falcon, that could well destroy the suborbital tourism market for them before it even gets off the ground. If you're buying a space tourism ticket, would you rather go suborbital in a little passenger capsule for a few minutes, or a bigger-than-the-space-station passenger liner where you could fool around in free-fall for hours or days?