Last week, SpaceX made one of their biggest announcements yet — which is saying something,
because SpaceX makes a lot of big, exciting announcements:
They’re planning to send people on a trip around the Moon before the end of next year!
The two-person crew will spend about a week in space: they’ll head to the Moon, loop
around it once, then come back home.
Which, first of all, sounds amazing.
No humans have left Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended more than forty years
ago.
And now we’re going back!
But getting humans back to the Moon will take a lot of work.
SpaceX has never sent people to space before at all — just supplies and satellites.
Plus, the key components they’ll need for this mission have spent the last few years
hitting snags and delays.
And despite that, they’re saying they want to send people all the way to the Moon in
less than two years.
So it’s a pretty ambitious goal, and a lot of things will have to come together very
quickly if they’re going to be able to pull it off.
SpaceX has spent the last few years improving their Falcon 9 rocket, which is what they
use to launch satellites into orbit and supplies to the International Space Station, or ISS.
They’ve also been improving the Dragon capsule, which sits on top of the rocket and carries
the cargo to the ISS.
But the Falcon 9 can only launch things as far as Earth’s orbit, and the version of
Dragon they’re using now isn’t designed to carry humans.
So SpaceX has been working on a new rocket -- the Falcon Heavy -- and a new capsule called
the Crew Dragon to go with it.
The Falcon Heavy is basically three Falcon 9s strapped together, which will make it the
largest active rocket in the world once it’s finally on the pad.
The Crew Dragon will carry a human crew and everything they need in space.
It’ll also come with safety features like a launch abort system that automatically shoots
the capsule away from the rocket if something goes wrong.
Together, the Falcon Heavy and the Crew Dragon will be able to get people to the Moon and
back.
But the rocket and capsule are both still in development.
Crew Dragon’s gone through some early testing, but its first test flight to the ISS isn’t
until November of this year.
And that’s an uncrewed test.
Then, the first crewed test flight, with two NASA astronauts onboard, is set for May 2018.
The Falcon Heavy, meanwhile, has its first launch scheduled for this summer — and that’s
just a demo to show what it can do.
After that, it’s scheduled to bring a few satellites into orbit this fall -- assuming
that nothing goes wrong during the first launch.
And then … it’s off to the Moon?
That doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time for testing before sending people on a trip
that’ll take them hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Earth.
And, to be clear, these are private citizens who are paying a ton of money for this trip.
SpaceX hasn’t released their names or how much they’re paying, although it’s probably
safe to assume that it’s a lot more than $58 million or so that it’ll eventually
cost to send astronauts to the ISS on the Crew Dragon.
So the crew won’t be professional astronauts with expert training for this mission.
They’ll still get some fitness testing and emergency training before they go up, just
in case something goes wrong, but it won’t be as rigorous or as drawn-out as full astronaut
training is.
But they also might not need more training, since they won’t actually be flying the
ship.
The flight will be almost completely automatic, with any course corrections either pre-programmed
before launch or directed from SpaceX headquarters down on the ground.
But there’s a chance that they’ll have more prep time than SpaceX is planning for,
anyway.
Delays are pretty common in the rocket-launching business.
The Falcon Heavy was originally supposed to be done in 2013, but it still hasn’t launched.
Most recently, practically everything SpaceX was working on got delayed while they figured
out what went wrong in last year’s Falcon 9 explosion.
That included the first Crew Dragon tests, which also pushed back all the other Crew
Dragon tests and missions like the ones to the ISS.
This stuff is literally rocket science, and SpaceX has to make sure they get it exactly
right — especially when there are lives at stake.
But whether it happens next year or in 2020 or in 2025, SpaceX will probably send people
to the Moon eventually.
And with their long-term plans to send humans to Mars, it might not be long before people
are buying tickets there, too.
And I don’t know about you, but that’s a future I’m excited for.
Speaking of launches: our brand-new channel, SciShow Psych, just launched earlier this
week!
The first two episodes are already up, so head on over to youtube.com/scishowpsych if
you want to check it out.
And don’t forget to subscribe!