What could be more amazing than a trip around the moon?
Two lucky (and very rich) passengers will get to experience that next year.
SpaceX announced on February 27 that it will provide a tourist trip around the moon using a spaceship under development for NASA and a heavy-lift rocket that has yet to be flown.
This is the first privately funded tourist flight beyond the orbit of the International Space Station. It is tentatively targeted for late 2018, Space Exploration Technologies Chief Executive Elon Musk told reporters on a recent conference call.
Of course, the identities of the two tourists who will get to see the dark side of the moon, and how much they’re paying for the privilege, remain private. Musk did say they know each other and that it’s “nobody from Hollywood.”
The trip is scheduled to take a week, and Musk says that the two prospective space tourists would undergo “extensive training” before going on the mission.
“I think there’s a market for one or two of these per year,” Musk told reporters. He said the tourist fares could eventually contribute to 10 to 20 percent of the company’s revenue.
Musk did say that if NASA wants to be first in line for a lunar flyby, they would take priority. That’s understandable, since SpaceX does have a $10 billion backlog of 70 or so missions for NASA and commercial customers
The trajectory of the planned passenger trip would be similar to NASA’s 1968 Apollo 8 mission, which flew a crew of three astronauts around the moon and back. The upcoming two-passenger flight will be 300,000 to 400,000 miles long, go past the moon until it’s sucked in by the Earth’s gravity, and will end in a parachute landing.
Before the launch can go ahead, it needs to be approved and licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration.
SpaceX isn’t the first company to plan space tourism. Virgin Galactic is planning to offer passenger flights into Earth’s orbit for the price of $250,000 per ticket. Russian aerospace company Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia is also trying to be the first to offer space tourists an opportunity to orbit the moon.
RSC Energia would be using Soyuz spacecraft to orbit the moon. It’s also planning to sign a deal in March 2017 to offer seats on the Soyuz spacecraft to tourists who want to visit the International Space Station.