SpaceX Announces a Second Private Flight To the Moon Aboard Starship (arstechnica.com) 72
Entrepreneur Dennis Tito and his wife, Akiko Tito, announced Wednesday that they purchased two tickets on the second of SpaceX's planned circumlunar flights later this decade. Dennis Tito made history when he became the first person to pay for his own ride into space more than two decades ago. He flew aboard a Soyuz vehicle and spent a week on the International Space Station. As for his wife, Akiko Tito, she becomes the first woman confirmed to fly on Starship, notes Ars Technica. From the report: The flight will last about a week, outbound to the Moon, passing within about 40 km of the surface and flying back. Ten other seats on Starship remain unsold and are available. Tito said he was not at liberty to disclose the price he paid. This brings the manifest of private human spaceflights on Starship, and its Super Heavy rocket, to three. There is billionaire Jared Isaacman's Polaris III mission, likely to low Earth orbit, which will be followed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa's "dearMoon" flight, the first human Starship flight around the Moon. Then comes Tito and the second circumlunar mission.
SpaceX has also contracted with NASA to fly the first human landing on the Moon as part of the Artemis program, but for now, NASA astronauts will launch on a separate rocket and rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit to go down to the lunar surface and back to orbit. So far, NASA hasn't announced plans to launch astronauts from Earth on Starship or land them back here. The timeline for all of these missions hinges on the development of the Starship vehicle, which may make a debut orbital test flight in the coming months from South Texas. After that, the large, fully reusable launch system will fly dozens of uncrewed missions, mostly carrying Starlink payloads, before humans climb on board. This is because Starship will make a propulsive landing back on Earth -- something no crew vehicle has ever done -- and has no backup should there be some sort of landing failure.
SpaceX has also contracted with NASA to fly the first human landing on the Moon as part of the Artemis program, but for now, NASA astronauts will launch on a separate rocket and rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit to go down to the lunar surface and back to orbit. So far, NASA hasn't announced plans to launch astronauts from Earth on Starship or land them back here. The timeline for all of these missions hinges on the development of the Starship vehicle, which may make a debut orbital test flight in the coming months from South Texas. After that, the large, fully reusable launch system will fly dozens of uncrewed missions, mostly carrying Starlink payloads, before humans climb on board. This is because Starship will make a propulsive landing back on Earth -- something no crew vehicle has ever done -- and has no backup should there be some sort of landing failure.
Ya, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
A flight back to Earth costs extra. :-)
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A flight back to Earth costs extra. :-)
No, they said it will be a circumlunar mission [wikipedia.org], which uses a free-return trajectory.
Does elon even care any more? (Score:4, Interesting)
Going to the moon let alone Mars is stupid (Score:2)
There. I said it already. Does anybody remember who the second person was after Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest?? No, of course not. It just doesn't carry the meaning that it once had nor will it ever. Besides that, if you're looking to leave the Earth and colonize space because Earth is or will become a bad place and hence uninhabitable, anywhere in the solar system is far, far worse. The low gravity by itself will reak havoc on human biological systems faster than evolution could compensate for. And th
Re: Going to the moon let alone Mars is stupid (Score:3)
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"america" wasn't america yet but it already had a breathable atmosphere and bearable temperatures not to mention a colossal wealth of untapped natural resources at arms reach. have you ever seen a picture of mars? well that's what america will look like given time, it does not work the other way around :-P
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The technology to tap resources in the wilderness that was the Americas was quite low during the sailing ships era. They could very well have been the terra incognita that mapmakers filled with drawings of fanciful dragons and other fantastic beasts.
The pre-European settlers probably achieved their feat by bootstrapping settlements, setting up camp at various points during their journey across Asia to what became the Russian colony of Alaska.
The breathable atmosphere problem can be solved, provided we could
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surviving isn't the same as living and thriving.
trashing planets is what our way of living does, and finding new planets to trash is not the correct approach not only because it is stupid but specifically because THERE ARE NONE IN REACH. if you consider that the best candidate is orders of magnitude more inhospitable than the most inhospitable region on earth it's simply infantile level of wishful thinking.
the correct approach is finding a way of living that doesn't fucking trash planets. the bad news is i
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The breathable atmosphere problem can be solved, provided we could get a fairly compact but reliable source of energy for extracting the oxygen embedded in Mars.
No, no, no, its a done deal. You don't "extract" oxygen in Mars soil. You "mine" Martian ice, or use electrolysis to extract H2O from the Martian "atmosphere". The energy source? Solar panels & batteries, or thermionic nuclear power. The more complicated setup Zubrin was talking about in the 1980's was more about generating rocket fuel (methane) from the Martian atmosphere, and probable automation (roboticization) of the process, so the synthesizing machines can be sent in advance to generate the r
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A well-planned (and needless to say well-funded) Mars settlement mission would be in a better position to survive than the Europeans that conquered the "New World".
I think its going to be more difficult than that, but likely as "survivable" enough to achieve semi-permanent residence goals.
The danger to permanent residence will probably be more from cabin fever [wikipedia.org] than from lack of resources.
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The danger to permanent residence will probably be more from cabin fever [wikipedia.org] than from lack of resources.
Agreed. But that doesn't make a manned Mars mission untenable, and dedicating financial resources for a semi-permanent manned presence on the Moon is a waste of time and money. Its part of the reason why I've always favored a direct, manned mission to Mars over a repeat of the Apollo program with 2020 technology. (But US TV execs do love their reboots...)
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So yes please. Manned spaceflight. Got to start somewhere.
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All that's true, but we have more pressing issues today which make it seem unlikely that changes in the sun are ever going to be relevant to humanity's descendants.
Re:Going to the moon let alone Mars is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's "decided it's ok to go extinct" option.
It's literally the opposite of that. A Mars colony can't happen fast enough to save humanity from what's happening on Earth now, because it can't be self-sustaining soon enough. Consequently, wasting time and energy on trying to make that happen now is consuming resources that we need to spend making things better here. Fucking around with colonizing Mars at this stage is the "go extinct" option, and believing that colonizing Mars can save us from ourselves in time to become self-supporting is delusional.
If
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It's literally the opposite of that. A Mars colony can't happen fast enough to save humanity from what's happening on Earth now, because it can't be self-sustaining soon enough
Once there's a permanent habitation that can support at least 500 mating pairs of humans, you have enough humans to perpetuate the race (outside of Earth) indefinitely. There are isolated islands on Earth that have supported lower populations of humans for centuries (e.g. - Tristan de Cunha).
With a directed non-governmental effort, this could be accomplished in decades, provided the participants can gather the necessary capital to pull it off. A Mars colony doesn't save the Earth; the Earth is "on its own
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If we're going to spend resources on doing shit in space, it should be asteroid mining, power generation, and generally moving heavy industry offplanet.
SpaceX's goal as long as Elon is alive is to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars. A self-sustaining colony has all required human heavy industry, by definition. So there ya go.
Sadly, it won't happen in our lifetimes even if the Starship program goes swimmingly. Everything we do industrially has to be redesigned to work in a vacuum. It could be done in our lifetimes but it would require the resources of a nation-state to achieve it. No on else can mobilize the literal millions of scientists and e
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this is true. it will make sense a couple billion years from now.
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There. I said it already. Does anybody remember who the second person was after Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest?
Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing is and was very famous in the UK.
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Neither of them has actually said who the first to the summit was. They refuse to say because they consider it a team effort, so we will probably never know who set foot there first.
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Neither of them has actually said who the first to the summit was. They refuse to say because they consider it a team effort, so we will probably never know who set foot there first.
One way or another we know the first two people to climb Everest, however.
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I'll bite. Why would better space telescopes be "more meaningful"?
It's not like better views of places we'll never go is particularly useful. So better space telescopes would be just a waste of money that could better be spent down here....
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Two big ones:
Detecting the next big asteroid that's going to hit us. We're a bit overdue, and have just proven the technology that'll let us make it miss *if* we spot it soon enough.
Particle and other new physics. No particle accelerator or gravitational experiment we ever build will begin to compare to the events and energy levels continuously on display throughout the universe. We know we have some major flaws in our understanding of physics, and there's no telling what technologies may grow out of mor
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No particle accelerator or gravitational experiment we ever build will begin to compare to the events and energy levels continuously on display throughout the universe.
But there's no guarantee that such a space event, that can make radical changes to the understanding of our universe will be captured by a space telescope, or the number of telescopes "needed" for this to happen (or that these events would be guaranteed to be captured, even if we had 100 space telescopes supported by hundreds of thousands of world class astrophysicists subsidized by national entities).
Asteroid defense is a joke. No one wants to spend trillions of dollars for an event that may not happen fo
Either Hillary or Norgay [Re:Going to the moon...] (Score:2)
There. I said it already. Does anybody remember who the second person was after Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest??
Since Edmund Hillary was steadfastly silent on the question of whether he or Tenzing Norgay was literally the first to reach the summit of Everest, the second person was either: Edmund Hillary or Tenzing Norgay.
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Ah, wasn't aware of this. Do you have a citation?
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Although it's slightly odd that it implies that it was a secret until Hillary made the claim after Norgay's death, but then at the bottom says Norgay had already stated he was second, quoting him: "If it is a shame to be the second man on Mount Everest, then I will have to live with this shame." And Wikipedia says, "Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed," and that was only 2
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Thanks.
I now know more than I did.
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Is 3 days a good deal if it costs so much that you can only go back there 20,000 days later? Perhaps a steady stream of cheaper 3,000 day missions is better. Especially if we talk about Mars, where it's a lot easier to launch 900kg of rover than 12 person-years of supplies for humans.
Re: Going to the moon let alone Mars is stupid (Score:1)
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i agree with most of this but space faring as tourism has indeed value. i would go on that trip if i had the money, just because. i expect in short/mid term future many people will, even if some company will go bust in the process, specially if they manage to fry a billionaire on the way up or choke him to death, others will follow.
also, a mining operation, hugely automated needless to say, is something i could envision.
the whole colonization trope though is of course utter nonsense, along with space statio
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Besides that, if you're looking to leave the Earth and colonize space because Earth is or will become a bad place and hence uninhabitable, anywhere in the solar system is far, far worse.
Confronted with Earth becoming uninhabitable and capitalism/petrochemical companies making it impossible to implement a solution in time, I guess you're in favor of Elon giving up, so humanity can die from cooking in civilizations' metabolic waste.
The low gravity by itself will reak havoc on human biological systems faster than evolution could compensate for
No gravity. We have no studies for long term "low" gravity environments and human health.
And there's no fixing that with any technology I know about.
Living in a spinning wheel providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
But I'm done with the so called send a man to Mars claptrap. All it is is another government agency justifying a yearly budget. Not accomplish anything great.
Except SpaceX is committed to putting man on Mars, even if there is no gov't subsidy. That'
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Because Russia is the one who is going to the stars...
Go home Vlad, you're drunk. (more than usual)
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It's probably more that he's bored while waiting for regulations and engineering to get Starship up up and away. The dude seems to have the attention span of a gnat when things don't move at a breakneck pace, and that's AFTER smoking himself blind with weed.
Granted, who among us with nearly unlimited funding wouldn't go a little crazy with projects? I know my, "If I had all the money in the world" list isn't a single line item, and I doubt I have the imagination of somebody that's lived with that kind of ti
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and just give Russia what they want.
Why would you agree to be Putin's slave, merely to avoid the possibility of nuclear war? What do you think happens when some other autocratic nation comes along with nuclear weapons and threatens to end everything? Mere capitulation doesn't guarantee the survival of humans (at a really shitty standard of living).
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he seems to be wanting to play "international politics" with Putin now,
Only if you believe Ian Bremmer/Vice, that basically allowed themselves to "publish" that story using Musk as the primary and only source.
Elon was always about chasing distractions, but the two distractions he had ever staked real money on was Tesla and Space X, and he's followed through on a lot of his goals for them. Elon used to speak against Moon missions, but if the USG is hell bent on going to the Moon first, Elon is willing to use USG money.to subsidize development of his Mars rocket (Starship), Dra
"flight TO the moon" (Score:1)
They are not going TO the moon.
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Sure they are. About half of the flight they're going to the moon, and about half of the flight they're coming back from the moon.
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Heh heh.
And yet, try going to the store that way and you'll still be hungry.
Re: "First" ?! (Score:2)
Re: "First" ?! (Score:2)
Almost like they did it the first time.
Plot twist: the first time around the movie studio was in the moon, owing to CGI being prohibitively expensive back in the day.
No Backup? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...and has no backup should there be some sort of landing failure."
Unlike, what, a plane? Which just stays in the air forever in the event of a landing failure?
What is this phrase supposed to even mean?
That's free extra excitement. (Score:2)
There is no backup Starship inside Starship and no secondary parachute.
So when things go wrong, you touchdown on the earth at 14.567 mph.
At least you can tell that you made it into space.
That is some achievement seen the fact that the SLS still hasn't lifted itself a single feet of the surface yet.
If we would stack all the dollar bills invested in the SLS, we could build a stairway to the moon.
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What is this phrase supposed to even mean?
A landing failure does not mean they do not land, it means that something goes wrong during landing which results in damage to the craft.
In this case it means that in the event of a landing failure, there isn't a Starship that will be ready in time to launch a rescue mission. Effectively, if they become shipwrecked on the moon then the only thing that can be done is to watch them die.
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Planes do have backups if say the landing gear fails. They are called parachutes. Plus planes can land without a landing gear, or engines, or parts of the control surfaces missing.
Rocket powered craft that land vertically, like Starship, have low tolerance for failures. They need their engines to work, and their control surfaces to work. Failure of any one of them makes a safe landing almost impossible. A botched landing also has a very low survivability rate, e.g. where it touches down safely but falls ove
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Planes do have backups if say the landing gear fails. They are called parachutes. Plus planes can land without a landing gear, or engines, or parts of the control surfaces missing.
There is only one airplane that has a parachute. It is a little thing that holds only three or four people, and goes less than 200 MPH. There might be a few people on Slashdot who own one, but aside from that...No, airplanes do not have parachutes.
Rocket powered craft that land vertically
...optimally :)
Apollo 13 managed OK with half of it blown up and no backup plan. So it's not impossible that they could get back and do a re-entry and live through it. It's not clear how that could work, but it would not be the first time something like that has h
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Go ahead and try to find the parachutes next time you're on a passenger airline. There aren't any (for passengers), mostly because without adequate training they're just a better ventilated way to die.
And yeah, with a skilled and lucky pilot an airliner can potentially land with moderate damage well enough to have a good chance that a lot of passengers will survive. But lose all engines, or a wing, the tail, etc. and... well there's a reason for the old line about bending over, hugging your legs, and kiss
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I read that as "landing *system* failure". If a plane's engines die it can glide; if its landing gear fails to deploy it can still perform a controlled belly landing; if it's approaching at a bad trajectory it can take another go-around.
Starship has redundant landing engines (at least one prototype landing test failure was because it wasn't prepared to *use* the redundant engines; lesson learned...), but unless they're keeping better ideas secret, the current backup plan if a trajectory goes bad is "fall i
I'm fine with blasting them to the moon (Score:2)
But do we really have to bring them back? I mean, they already paid for the trip, didn't they?
Why two rockets for the lunar mission? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a reason other than, "well, we spent a lot of money on Artemis, even when it was becoming clear that it was redundant, so if we don't use it people might realize we are as badly run as the rest of the government."?
Re:Why two rockets for the lunar mission? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a reason other than, "well, we spent a lot of money on Artemis, even when it was becoming clear that it was redundant, so if we don't use it people might realize we are as badly run as the rest of the government."?
You make sounds like NASA has a choice about the SLS. US Congress mandated the SLS be built and used. NASA is run quite well, it is the US Congress that has wasted billions on the SLS.
Re:Why two rockets for the lunar mission? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have the reason worked out. SLS needs to do something after all that money was tossed at it. Hopefully, we get over our fascination with throwing bad money after good once it's done it's basic trip there and we start thinking about conservation of spending for future space endeavors. I know, not with our congress controlling the purse strings. It's frustrating as somebody that would like to see actual progress, rather than pork spending on top of pork spending trying to prevent actual progress in order to pour money into home congressional districts.
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It doesn't make sense to keep ferrying large amounts of mass back and forth between the Moon, or landing more mass than you have to. The more mass you take the more fuel you need.
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Two reasons.
1) NASA can't ditch SLS for political reasons.
2) Starship lacks emergency escape options during launch or landing, and will be a long way from having a well NASA grade "failure is not an option" proven track record by the time Artemis flies. And I'm betting that last minute flip when landing is going to make a lot of bureaucrats nervous for quite some time. Somewhat ironically, landing on the moon is a lot easier and safer than landing on Earth.
Of course, there's no real reason SLS has to hand
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Something even newer, but developed under the old "failure is not an option" philosophy. Not to mention using a lot of parts (like the engines) that already have a long and reliable track record on the Space Shuttle.
SpaceX's "move fast and blow things up" philosophy has delivered incredible results, but the "blow things up" part is a very real part of the process. That makes it inadvisable to put human lives at unnecessary risk until the hardware has matured enough to have a reliable track record.
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The former head of manned spaceflight at NASA lost her job for pointing this out.