Japanese Billionaire is Passenger on SpaceX BFR Moon Flight
Yusaku Maezawa at SpaceX headquarters. (Credit: SpaceX webcast)
Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa was introduced on Monday as the customer for SpaceX’s planned circumlunar flight aboard the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
The 42-year old billionaire, who founded the clothing company Zozo (www.zozo.com) and collects high-priced art, said he plans to invited six to eight artists on the trip who would create works of art after returning home. The passengers could include painters, sculptors, film directors, architects, writers and fashion designers.
Musk praised Maezawa as brave to take the flight. “This is dangerous, let’s be clear,” Musk warned. “This is no walk in the park.”
Maezawa’s flight is tentatively scheduled to occur in 2023. SpaceX Founder Elon Musk admitted he was not sure of the date because BFR is still under development.
Musk said Maezawa made a significant deposit on the expensive voyage around the moon. The funds will help fund the development and testing of the reusable rocket/spacecraft, which Musk estimated will cost $5 billion.
Maezawa is calling his flight Dear Moon and has established a website, dearmoon.earth. The flight’s Twitter handle is @dearmoonmission.
158 responses to “Japanese Billionaire is Passenger on SpaceX BFR Moon Flight”
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It’s cool that he is bringing top notch artists and sculptures with him…they will indeed create some awe inspiring creations.
Yes. Like bringing a teacher along.
Sooo .. does anyone take this seriously ? Because the whole presentation was a bit of a joke. Musk was just handwaving and pulling random numbers out of .. where it hurts. 2 billion, 10 billion, three gees, six gees, who knows. 2023 maybe, 2026 definitely.
Yep it’s serious, or at least the vehicles are.
Cheers
He has a plant he is building at the Port of Los Angles that shows he is serious.
And according to the presentation, one hull barrel section has already been fabricated and the full-size Raptor is well into testing. Musk isn’t waving his hands, he’s waving a conductor’s baton.
But no completed tank designs to fit into that barrel section. And, how wide is that barrel section ? Does SpaceX have any tooling to build LOX and Methane tanks that size ?
LOX and Methane tanks will be built on the same mandrel. It’s not a tank-in-structure design, but a tank-as-structure design.
Yes.
Absolutely. Why don’t you?
“Sooo .. does anyone take this seriously ?”
Which time and for what claim?
Musk said he would launch the Falcon 1 and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would launch the Falcon 9 and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would launch the Dragon capsule and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would birth the dragon with ISS and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would recover the dragon and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would land a first stage on a boat and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would land a second stage on land and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would launch the Falcon Heavy and people said the same thing.
The only thing that EVER happens is the goal posts get moved.
To be picky, he hasn’t landed a SECOND stage at all but I take your point. I don’t doubt that he’ll build his rocket. The question is when it will be complete and what will be its characteristics and capabilities when it finally launches. I’d hold off on the congratulations until the first test launch at least.
And that falls under “moving the goal posts” . I am not making congratulations speeches I am merely pointing out that as soon as one goal of MANY POTENTIAL goals gets reached that detractors said would not happen they move the goal post and say “ya but he has not done this yet”
So he has not launched a human to LEO and once he does it will be “hasn’t landed anyone on the moon yet” – then “ya but he hasn’t landed anyone on Mars yet”
we all know they are coming in the future ..
I basically can tell what SpaceX is currently working on hard (in general terms) by detractors starting to get quiet about what he will never do. Used to be common place to hear about him never lifting NASA astros to ISS, now that crowd got real quiet as flight hardware started showing up at the Cape. Same for FH, 27 engines, blah blah blah. Once the hardware was being assembled (crickets).
“Musk said he would land a second stage on a boat and people said the same thing.
Musk said he would land a second stage on land and people said the same thing.”
Having a “wait and see” attitude does not make me a detractor and whether one views the goal posts as being pushed back depends on what the goal is. Will he do it? Probably. Will he be first to land a human on Mars? Maybe. What is the goal? Anointing Elon Musk as the worlds greatest engineer? That’s a question that can never be answered – at least for the next billion years or so.
I think Terry was pointing out that you meant “first stage” in your list not second. It’s the Falcon first stage that they recovered. Musk has never said he would recover the second stage (although he talked about them playing with the idea using FH.)
He did very early talk about the reuse of the second stage, there is a video record of the various options they worked through. Bottom line there was a to great of loss of cargo if you added reusablity. They had considered the FH and then add the extra weight for the dragon landing gear and heatshield but in the end decided not to invest anymore and instead the next iteration the BFR.
Same with the commercial version of the Dragon. By the time NASA got finished micro-managing it, it was seen to have little value for space tourism or private flights because of it splashing down in the ocean, so he moved on to the BFR.
They still have skunkworks project to pursue S2 recovery for F9. Sort of a SpaceX hobby project.
Could you find this for me? I’ve not heard of that.
oops .. I just saw it .. I was looking at the wrong post.
Thanks for the heads up .. (thanks terry!)
Cherry pick, much ? That Falcon 1 was supposed to be in regular service. That dragon was supposed to be on Mars this year.
If a vehicle 10 times larger than BFR is in regular service 10 years from now, are you really going to make this same argument?
Falcon 1 was retired for something better.
Years late and dollars short. The F9H has been launched, but where is the next one with a paying customer? The first one was supposed to be launched from Vandenberg AFB years ago, but I don’t think they have even built the infrastructure to do that yet. The Dragon cargo capsule was said to have been built with all of the underpinnings for a manned version. That just got pushed back some more, again. Wasn’t it only supposed to be 12-18 months once they got funding to have that ready to test?
F1 is nothing but a memory so while they did it, it didn’t make sense to keep around. Orbital (now part of Northrop), the Russians and the Japanese all re-supply ISS, so SX is just one vendor. The landing on a barge thing is tough. Hats off for that one. The land doesn’t heave up and down very often so it’s much easier.
They aren’t moving goal posts anywhere.
1) It’s FH not F9H (The fact you don’t know that means you are woefully detached since F9H went away years ago)
2) Vandy was upgraded. GSE is almost all there, just needs to have the extra FSMs installed on the reaction frame; propellant tanks installed, TE upgraded and extra suppression installed.
3) Air Force STP-2 mission is a paid mission to demo FH in full Block 5 configuration and another test of the long duration coast to support direct to geo insertion.
4) Why would a company stick with a product that isn’t profitable? Have you ever worked for a company that didn’t ever drop a product? Who cares? Best part was they were able to leverage F1 into F9 and use a lot of capability Merlin/Avionics and others.
How much hurt do you have to be in the FUD this much?
“Years late” – Irrelavent was the goal completed? Yes.
“and dollars short” – Irrelavent, this was done as fixed price so delays did not cost the tax payer like a traditional cost plus, fixed fee, sole sourced, FAR development contracts.
“The F9H has been launched, but ” Everything after but is irrelavent was the goal was to launch a Falcon heavy.
“The first one was supposed to be launched from Vandenberg AFB years ago,” launch schedules and pads have changed historically. The end goal was not the fact they launched from there, the goal was a successful test launch of the launch vehicle.
“The Dragon cargo capsule was said to have been built with all of the underpinnings for a manned version.” That was never the PRIMARY goal. The primary goal was to successfully test flight a cargo vehicle to LEO and safetly return it, accomplished and then successfully test birthing a cargo vehicle to the ISS again accomplished.
“F1 is nothing but a memory” – AGAIN irrelevant. Did it have a successful test flight? Yes, Did it launch a sat payload for a customer, again yes.
“Orbital (now part of Northrop), the Russians and the Japanese all re-supply ISS, so SX is just one vendor.” Now this is TOTALLY irrelevant that has nothing to do with people moving the goal posts on SpaceX.
So .. the bottom line .. your post was and is totally irrelevant to the fact that SpaceX stated goals and almost without exception the primary goals have been fulfilled. So SpaceX stated they are going to the moon and the statement “Sooo .. does anyone take this seriously ?” is ludicrous since anyone looking at this can see it is extremely likely that it will happen.
FH was done at zero cost to taxpayer. The FH program was funded completely with SpaceX profits. USAF got a development free heavy lift launch vehicle. And this knuckle head we’re dealing with is complaining about the delay. WTF
Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch ArabSat NET November.
oops. NET 2019-01
Ben Cooper (launchphotography.com) had it as NET November last week. Looks like he took it down for now. Realistically, it’s December-January. SpaceX has a very busy fall launch schedule coming up.
WOW.
I have not seen such BS here since Gaetano Marano was around here.
The next FH is scheduled for Jan 1st to launch Arabiasat. That is a paying private customer.
They redid the dragon to make it safer and it was to go to Mars. NASA fought that idea, but that was only recently that it was taken off the mars landers idea. In addition, until 2 years ago, the GOP CONgress ( basically the GOP house) refused to fully fund SpaceX. So, now that they have funding, they will be launching their first Dragon V2, in December.
As to taking 12-18 months, well, hard to do that when CONgress is messing with the money and various groups in NASA continue to change the requirements and testing on the fly. As it is, Dragon will likely be the SAFEST human launch vehicle ever built and used.
Yes, there are multiple cargo vendors and all are needed. All have had issues so supplies were slowed down, but never stopped.
And while I agree that the barge is MUCH harder to land on than land, the fact is, that SX and BO are the only 2 that have even landed on land, and SX is the only barge lander.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
And yes, goal posts are constantly moved. OTOH, over the next 6 months, SX should be having FH on a decent schedule, AND assuming all goes correctly with Dragon V2, they should have human launch working as well.
All in all, that means, by mid 2019, they can focus on getting SpaceLink and BFR going.
The only question they were addressing was who is going, how, and why. Those seem pretty solid.
The when and how much clearly don’t have good answers yet. Nor do many of the technical questions that a lot of people want answered. But do you seriously expect them to have things like the exact trajectory nailed down already?
A lot of what was pressed is clearly a work in progress. And it’s progressing at an astonishing rate, even if it’s not as fast as Musk’s optimistic timelines.
They will get there. In some form. Eventually.
This presentation tells me that idea of shutting down the Falcon line is not going to happen any time soon. SX is going to be busy flying and perfecting a BFS for people. Do you think operators of $250 M dollar GEO birds are going to put their precious cargo right next to something that makes the loudest “Who” concert sound like the gentle breeze flowing over the American prairie? This all came across as an art project. It’s Burning Man to the Moon. I’d take this much more seriously if they were going to do a BFS with a huge payload bay that you put stuff in. And if you want people, you put in a huge hab module like they used to do with Shuttle. Then do the dedicated space liner later.
I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, the BFR would be so loud that some companies will not want to have their payloads in the area when (if) it launches. Not that the payloads would be on the rocket, but everything for miles will be shaken up quite a lot.
While they didn’t reveal any specifics, I got the distinct impression that the financial contribution here is substantial, and that the lunar fly-by probably isn’t the only ‘payoff’ for Mr MZ.
The discussion on funding makes it clear that that issue is far from settled, though there are opportunities being pursued. A big contribution from a billionaire will allow them to proceed with development more quickly than they might have otherwise.
The usual running gag in New Space is that something is 2 years away. It’s also a truism that big plans change on first contact with real engineering. Is this tourist and his posse going to pay the whole $5 billion or is SpaceX going to need to come up with $4.5 billion to complete the project provided everything goes according to schedule even when anything like this ever goes to schedule?
Elon likes to talk, likes to wave his hands and likes poorly thought out graphics. A moon shot is going to take 10+ years. A lot has been learned since from the Mercury program to today, but Apollo had something like 4 million man-years of labor to make it go. Drop that by an order of magnitude and it’s still 400,000 man years of labor. Does anybody really think that the complexity and time to engineer a trip to the moon has dropped by six orders of magnitude? Does anybody believe it could happen with Elon closely supervising every aspect of every piece of the engineering?
Yup
I have Guessed/predicted SpaceX lands on the moon in 2025 or 6. I stand by that prediction.
SpaceX WILL get it done!!!
Earlier this year I watched Falcon Heavy launch from Playalinda Beach. I will watch the V5 version of Falcon Heavy launch later this year or early next year. And I will watch when SpaceX launches Monster to LEO in about 5 years.
I was the guy that drove to Jacksonville and caught the first picture of a piece of a Falcon 9 recovered on a Barged. It was a Falcon leg left on the deck after a Falcon crashed on the barge.
Later Shotwell said success!!! We hit the barge!!!
These folks get it done one way or the other, sooner or later.
Second that. ‘Ad astra’
The good thing about Space X is, so far, it gets done. Based on history you can’t say “sooner or later” , you can say “later rather than sooner”.
But given that when was the last NASA flagship project that came in on time and budget?
I’m not making that comparison, you really can’t stop can you? When folks like me put a boundary around Space X it’s not to put them down. It’s to govern outrageous enthusiasm of a proponent. We need a community of analysts, not advocates. People who can step outside their belief system and passions, take a look around see where things lie, how they work. Then, go back into their chosen reference frame, perhaps discussing with themselves if they still want to be in that reference frame after having had a look, and move forward with a better informed outlook.
Of course SpaceX does things NASA can’t/won’t do. We ALL get that. They’re not bound by the same issues that bind NASA. But they are limited in what they can do. They’re bound by time, money, people, technology, and physics. As observers of the space community we should be analysts first and advocates second.
Except that neither Elon Musk or NASA are interested in our analysis, nor anyone in the beltway for that matter. It’s a closed echo chamber. But when I do policy consulting I do view it as an analysis. But here I an looking to get folks dreaming again, and grasp just how much the world might change IF he succeeds. And how he will turn the world of those beltway experts upside down 🙂
The United States does not need a population of emotive feelers who can be led to yell and cheer for one program or another. An educated and thoughtful citizenry is essential for the pursuit of well thought out colonial efforts. If you simply create a camp of emotive feelers who are easily guided by propaganda and marketing schemes, the meme that preaches destruction and doing nothing will win, simply because it’s more fun, and easier to do.
It would be nice if schools did produce that type of citizen, but the really is they don’t and there seems no effort being made to correct it at the national level. I do the best that I am able in teaching my business students the elements of Rhetoric in the management communication classes I teach, and about America’s inventors and innovators in a Business History class, but the K-12 system seems to have other priorities.
You are hitting on a big problem we both agree on. From my time sitting out the Bush recession as a network admin at the math dept at the UofA, I had a lot of contact with professors who had some really good insights as to why American children lag the rest of the world in education, and some of those professors blame the parents as the root of the problem. One went so far as to do a research project where not only did they start a math tutoring program for the students, but also for the parents as well. That said, yes both left and right have striven to turn the American academic environment into a exercise in propaganda that pushes both side’s skewed worldview. No arguments there.
You first.
Outrageous Enthusiasm is Good!
That is what NASA programs lack do to endless pork cooked over Decades.
Analyst first? Advocates second?
I respectfully disagree
We need enthusiastic people that share with others to help keep the public interested in opportunities that space can provide should we ever make spaceflight affordable.
Don’t complain about broken political systems, ignorant politicians, ignorant constituents , defense contractors bilking the tax payer, and wasteful government space projects. Your “advocate first” approach feeds the system that creates the problems slowing us down today.
Nothing new there. If you read the book “Sea of Glory” by Nathaniel Philbrick about the U.S. Navy’s around the world exploring expedition in the 1840’s it shows nothing have changed in Washington. It is how government funded exploration has always worked.
Sooner than anyone else.
Later than originally predicted but still way ahead of everyone else. Suits me.
Compare that to everyone else who are many years behind SpaceX if even on the playing field.
You say the leader is late!
That is funny
Space X declares their own delivery dates, so yes, they come in late. But as you point out, it does not matter. In the case of this flight it does, for the various reasons that have gone back and forth in this thread.
Why is this flight any different? It is not government funded, and by the time it actually takes place no one will remember the date it was promised for, as was the case with the FH launch.
SpaceX is not government funded? ????? Please don’t start changing history while it’s being made. Wait about 5 years after it’s played out. I don’t have to provide links to the NASA funding for Falcon, Dragon, and Crew Dragon do I? SpaceX is a efficient and effective investment of public dollars. Were it not for those dollars, that enterprise would have been shutdown in the early 2000’s.
SpaceX has the government as a customer, but that is not the same as the government funding that the Old Space contractors have. Yes, the government is a major customer in the space market, and SpaceX has profited well from selling to it. but that is far different than the Shuttle/Apollo model where contractors built vehicles for NASA to own and operate. SpaceX owns its Dragons and Falcons, not the U.S. government.
So far the government has shown no interest in the BFR which is targeted at private markets, like the flight Yusaku Maezawa.
You can cut it any way you want. Space X is a socialist entity. Without the public sector, they would not exist. They are not a private independent entity. Without a willing public they would be gone. That will change with the years, but for the past 15 years, and for now, that’s the case. You can pretend all you want otherwise, but the cold hard reality is Elon is a socialist just like business men in Western Europe who get/got their startup cash from a government.
Andrew if you think about it, per your definition any and every economic entity that directly or indirectly receives tax-payer dollars for products or services, or benefits from public framework, resources and organization is a socialist entity.
Agreed though. SpaceX would not have survived as an entity without NASA and the USAF. Bidding and winning development and service contracts for the US government is what enabled the company to survive the Falcon 1 crunch.
frontiers in the US are not opened without the help financial and otherwise of the government
The key is to have an exit strategy to allow free markets to eventually take over. The land grants the Railroads received were used to attract immigrates from Europe.
https://www.loc.gov/collect…
Comsat is also a good example of this. Sadly, NASA isn’t. There was no exist strategy for CCP or COTS. It is why I keep recommending a Lunar Development Corporation to replace NASA for being the lead for America to return to the Moon.
yes the key is to have government funds enable private contractors to enable free enterprise…see Syncom series of communications sats
the problem is that government goals in US space flight are and have been made with little concern for anything other then national pride AND now today the space industrial complex.
Bezos recognizes the need for an economic engine in space. I am not for sure Musk does
And the American West would not have been opened as easily if the market for the Army Forts had not existed. Its why cities like Fort Worth and Fort Stockton have fort in their name.
In earlier times they would be. However, I would not call them socialist, more fascist per Benito Mussilini’s definition, but that’s a toxic label today and you can’t argue that without turning off the conversation. However, you’re right, I’m saying that these are not capitalist enterprises who are raising their capital on the open marketplace. They are forcing most of their venture capital and securing future business from the taxpayers just as my paycheck is forced from your hands per my paycheck from an educational institution. I’m not saying they should not do it. I understand why they do. However having done so, I argue they should be treated as a different form of corporation and they should be regulated and taxed differently than a corporation grown organically in the marketplace free of government largess. In exchange for the nature of my paycheck I take a $30,000 to $40,000 a year pay cut to work in my chosen field. For a corporation to pass on the startup capital and technical risk while reaping the full economic benefits of the profit is good business, but another form of theft.
LOL. I think you have been reading too many pro-Trump news websites. 🙂
https://www.breitbart.com/c…
Elon Musk: ‘I Am a Socialist’
Government spending accounts for 1/5 of the economy. Its not wise for any business to ignore it. Exxon sells a good portion of their products to the DOD. Does that make them socialist? The Steel firms sell a good portion of their products to make military systems. Does that make the Steel industry socialist?
Come on, be honest here. when a government provides venture capital, accepts risk, and the profit is privatized, what do you call that? Good business no doubt if you can get it, but that’s not capitalism.
What are you talking about? The venture capital came from Elon Musk and his investors, NOT the government. SpaceX has NO government loans. The government does NOT own a single share of SpaceX stock.
SpaceX only gets paid AfTER they finished providing the contracted services to NASA, not before. If they fail to deliver the service they would NOT get paid. That is how COTS and CCP works. SpaceX earns its money from selling it services to NASA and uses the profits for R&D, like the Falcon Heavy. No one paid for the first flight, which is why Elon Musk was free to launch his roadster on it.
It’s my understanding Space X got funded for development of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon, and Dragon 2. I’ll have to go look it up, but my memory is telling me the process was not even competitive such as a combat aircraft would have been. Musk capitalized on the close relationship he had with Mike Griffen to receive development funds for space station resupply post shuttle.
I watched Elon talk and wave his arms and make this video reality.
https://youtu.be/4Ca6x4QbpoM
Mr. Langley with solid government funding and a staff of engineers spent a decade on the problem of flight and failed. Professor Newcomb then showed with mathematics it’s impossible to build a practical heavier than air flying machine. To think that two brothers and a hired mechanic could do so for a few hundred dollars in a little over three years working on it part time is insane… No, they should give up and stick to fixing bicycles.
Throughout history the real breakthroughs are always made by crazy entrepreneurs/inventors who are only spurred on by the noisy negativists who say it’s impossible. Its thanks to them we aren’t still living in caves fighting with hyenas for scraps of meat.
BTW the real reason America has created so many breakthroughs, and so much progress, is because our system allows those crazy entrepreneurs their turn at bat. Let’s give Elon Musk his turn at bat and see how well he does. Falcon 9 Block 5, Falcon Heavy and Dragon are indication he may well hit it out of the park again.
Well said!
Thanks! Here’s a song that a lot of kids used to sing in elementary school in the 1960’s, the basic theme song of Tomorrowland 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Hopefully Elon Musk will get them dreaming again!
Or just Sinatra’s ‘High Hopes….’
Not going to disagree with what you said and we should all be grateful for those crazy entrepreneurs. People like Musk and Bezos should certainly be encouraged to push the boundaries. I’m anxious to see our young entrepreneurs do what hasn’t been done before. Give Musk and Bezos credit for developing booster reusability. That will be a great step in lowering the cost of flight. The medium and heavy lift rockets have been done before by others and re-usable crew and cargo vehicles were called shuttle orbiters back when the only dragons had scales. Saturn V is still the king of rockets and will remain so until BFR and New Armstrong actually fly. I am anxious to see that happen.
There are many other people out there that are just plain bat shit crazy. So far, Elon leans towards that category.
What do you base that on?
Nothing from him.
He has been kind of erratic of late but still seems to grasp reality.
I really do not think that he is being erratic as much as not filtering inner thoughts. Normally, we all filter. He is just getting a little bit to comfortable.
For example, I would be amazed if Musk does NOT have insider info about pedoman. The caver lives at ground zero for pedophilia.
BUT, to bring it up Not once, Not Twice, but THREE TIMES?????
Foolish. He gave him no choice but to have to sue. Hopefully, Musk has real data on the guy.
Hopefully he does not have anything on the guy and he gets his ass sued off for failure to filter. A dose of humility would do him good.
You’re leaving quite a lot out of the ‘Langley Shop’ vs the Wrights aren’t you?
Dr. Langley had a decade of government funding and access to any expert he needed. The Wrights has their bicycle shop for income and needed to teach themselves everything they needed to know, including how to build a light weight gasoline engine.
The real breakthrough of the Wrights were two-fold. 1 they understood the problem as a 6 degree of freedom problem. Probably from their experience as bicycle riders. 2 they isolated each problem into a series of smaller problems and deal with them as isolated problems. The Wright solutions to controls were sub-par. Wingwarping needed modern materials, and their pilot controls set up killed not a few pilots. Their aircraft never left the box kite stage. Their lawsuits against anyone trying to advance American aviation retarded American aviation development for almost 15 years. It was Glenn Curtis, a Sam Langley man, who saved American aviation. We use his control surfaces, his controls for the pilot, and his ideas on cockpit layout, in spite of every effort of the Wrights to shut him down. So yes, the Wrights did a excellent job cracking the scientific nut of powered flight. But they did everything they could to hold aviation in a place where they would hold a monopoly on powered flight. The gap between the Americans and Europeans when we entered the war in WWI, was their fault. They were a blessing and a curse. Just as Langley’s efforts retarded the solving of the problems of heavier than air flight, his operation was instrumental in pushing it forward. Again, a very mixed story. Not as simple and allegorical as you present to the world.
Glenn Curtis first started working on aviation in 1908, two years after Samuel Langley died, when he join the group Alexander Graham Bell had set up in Canada. His only connection to Dr. Langley was when the Smithsonian hired him to “fix” the Aerodrome in 1914 to prove it could have flown, something he did to try to weaken the case for the Wright Brothers patents. BTW the Wright Brothers patent lawsuits led government to pressure both sides to pool the patents.This led to the creation of the NACA, forerunner of NASA.
http://www.wright-brothers….
So yes, the lawsuits did hold up aviation, but they also led to the creation of NACA, and eventually NASA. If NACA didn’t exist as a model that could be used for a civilian space program it is possible that President Eisenhower might have left the space program under military control, perhaps under the U.S. Army, and we might have gotten an army base on the Moon instead of Project Apollo.
History always has its twists and turns. We are just seeing another one now because the Russian would sell Elon Musk a rocket to send a greenhouse to Mars 🙂
Army base on the Moon? Eisenhower? You obviously don’t understand the low opinion Ike had for space exploration. It was not about space for him, it was about immediate payoff in military capability. He would have never put forward a military role in space without a real application to the balance of power on the planet. He created NASA because he wanted civilian control of the militarily useless aspects of space flight.
Remember, during his Administration the United States was exploring the polar regions with the exploration being done by the military, especially the U.S. Navy, leading the way. The first station at the South Pole was built by the Seabees. Everyone expected the same model would be used for space exploration. After all the first U.S. satellites launched were by the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. The reason President Eisenhower was able to push for a civilian space agency, in contrast to the long history of the military leading exploration efforts, was because he had NACA to use as the core of it.
As for the U.S. Army Base on the Moon, a little blast from the past. BTW Marshall Space Center was able to develop the Saturn V as fast as it did because it was already working on the F-1 Engine for the venture.
https://www.defensemedianet…
The Antarctic base was and still is to serve geopolitical policy. US policy is to not respect any nation’s claim to Antarctic territory and our occupation of the pole ensured we would occupy most of the international claims made as many are pie shaped centered on the pole. The Arctic exploration was done in support of nuclear command and control and the stationing of runt Minuteman IRBM’s in Greenland.
Those military plans for off world bases had about as much chance of making it to reality as G HW Bush’s plans to turn NASA into a $20+ billion a year space program in early 90’s dollars. The H1 and F1 engines were developed for heavy lift as as a need was seen for manned recon with live photo analysis done on scene ala Almaz/MOL. They also foresaw the potential of pre-placing missile platforms in orbit, and in the 50’s were still looking at having operators manning switchboards to relay communications. Automation obviously shut this all down.
That was only because the 1967 OST prohibited claims of sovereignty. Otherwise they would be up there now.
How’s that? When our efforts in Antarctica are all about nulling out all other nations’ claim to Antarctic territory while making no claims of our own with the exception of occupation? Here are the current main bullet points for the current policy of the US re Antarctica.
* The U.S. recognizes no foreign territorial claims.
* The U.S. reserves the right to participate in any future uses of the region.
* Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only.
* There shall be free access for scientific investigation and other peaceful pursuits.
I don’t know offhand, but I think we (the US) wrote an awful lot of the Antarctic Treaty. The above policy bullets sound a lot like Eisenhower’s diplomacy speaking points. It’s right along the lines of his “Open Skies” initiative and others like it.
The U.S. did write it, and in doing so surrendered the territorial claims of Wilkes, Byrd, and Ellsworth, turning it into a continent for science, to one up the Soviet Union. But the impact on economic development was the same and so the only economic activities you have are the contracts to serve the scientists and adventure tourism. No real lost, but space deserves better.
I am curious Tom…assume Musk and “dear moon” or whatever it is is successful. what do you think will have been accomplished and what do you think changes?
Likewise…if it fizzles in a few years or worse fails. what happens?
The key is showing it is possible to explore with private funds. Hopefully it will be followed up with industrial development. Hopefully space industrial start ups will start to emerge. This is why Jeff Bezos has a better vision. He is interested in the economic development of the Earth-Moon system and just sees transportation as a means to the ends. But Elon Musk has focused on just be a transportation firm.
“They laughed at the Wright brothers” is one of the lamest arguments people could ever use in favour of anything.
Thomas thats an interesting recitation but…..
Musk is not the Wright brothers, he is not Glenn Curtiss either. AT best and we will see where this goes …he is at best the “design team’ that put together the Boeing 299, ie the folks at Boeing who in response to the need for a heavy bomber found themselves thinking four engine instead of two. NOw that is a pretty solid feat all on itself…
Musk, has impressively thought outside the box of the notion (at least on Falcon 9 and FH) of “lift”…and used solid advances in technology to accomplish what he has tried to do…but it is far to early to say that we are no longer fighting with the hyenas in space policy for the scraps of meat
Musk has not really proved (although I think he will) the cost effectiveness of reusability nor is it clear what the affect on “cost to orbit” is. but so far at least in human flight he is not set to do anything that Boeing is not set to do either.
and he, like Boeing is struggling to put people in orbit
before you or I start awarding him the “Wrights of this generation” we need to see where the next few years go.
and no I dont think that BFR/BFS to the moon is going to happen in 23. but I am willing to wait to see where it goes
I too am sitting on the fence, but optimistic, about the money savings from from re-use. I wonder if Space X is still in the startup phase where the company exists, functions, and performs for the sake of attracting investment dollars as opposed to closing the loop between investment and money from selling product and services with a bit-o profit when all is done and said.
Andrew I think Musk will or has gotten some savings from reusability…but if you listen to Musk instead of pushing some verifiable claims…he just keeps making “wilder” statements. the “I think a F9 cost can get down to 6 million…” has to be just rhetoric…they dont reuse the 2nd stage and I suspect if it cost a dime, it cost at least 6 million…so the first stage is “free” now
what Musk is arguing is that he has gone from experimental stages with Rockets to near airplane status in well less than 5 blocks. I dont believe him
The $6 million includes upper stage reuse, which has been an on-again, off-again plan for F9 for a decade. The upper stage likely costs around $10 million, so the lower cost bound without reusing it is somewhere around $15 million.
F9 is currently supposed to be 10 flights between major overhauls… that’s nothing at all like a commercial airliner. There might be some ultra high performance specialty planes like that.
if they get to 10 thats probably a good thing…unless there are no cost savings from it…ie it cost more to reuse then it does to build new at some point.
Does anybody really think that the complexity and time to engineer a trip to the moon has dropped by six orders of magnitude?
Well, I do. That’s one.
First, consider time. From first unmanned orbital satellite to a manned circum-lunar mission (Apollo 8) took the U.S. gov’t. 11 years. SpaceX orbited its first satellite in 2008. This BFR manned circum-lunar mission is set for NET 2023. That’s 15 years. So Elon is not looking to set any new speed record.
Complexity? That’s probably roughly a wash. Saturn 5 was very complex, but it also had six actual rocket stages (S-IC, S-II, S-IVB, CSM, LM Descent, LM Ascent) using five different engine types. BFR-BFS will have only two stages and use a single type of engine. But BFR-BFS will also have in-space refueling capability, a large deployable/retractable solar power array, many times the crew accommodations, crew sanitary facilities and a much more closed-loop environmental control system. The basic vehicle will be much less complex but the internal fitments and additional external systems (power, landing legs, wings) will likely more than make up the difference.
Adding materially to Apollo’s complexity was the multi-tiered sub-contractor model of component design and engineering. SpaceX’s vertical integration has already been demonstrated to knock at least 90% of man-hours and cost off large NASA-style development efforts.
A lot of additional leverage accrues from the half-century of advances in computer-based engineering tools that has occurred since Apollo. SpaceX uses the best it can find and, in the event the current best isn’t good enough, is quite capable of rolling its own better ones and has done so.
The money requirement has also – quite obviously – come down by several orders of magnitude.
BFR-BFS is quite a doable project for SpaceX. Will the first circum-lunar manned mission launch in 2023? I’d say the odds are probably not better than 1 chance in 10, but I don’t think they’re worse either. And even should said mission not occur before 2024, 2025 or 2026, it’s hard to see that as any sort of cosmic disaster. Mr. Maezawa is not of an age where an extra year or two or three is likely to make any existential difference.
It also helps to reduce the cost when you aren’t required to spread the work around many different states. Imagine for example the cost savings in travel alone if all of the work had been concentrated at KSFC, and there was no Marshal, Stennis, or Johnson NASA Centers to fund. And if the Solid Rocket Boosters had been built in Louisiana, or Florida instead of Utah the Challenger Astronauts would be alive today.
On what evidence do you base your statement that the Challenger Astronauts would still be alive today if the SRB’s had been assembled in Louisiana or Florida?
where he is going for there is the joints.ie that the “pour” could have been in one piece not segmented parts
I am not sure I share his views on this..
That would be a design/engineering change and have nothing to do with where the SRB was manufactured. I recognize that you may not agree with him. I think he was reaching.
It has everything to do with where they were manufactured. The joints were there because the solid fuel segments had to be shipped on a special train from Utah. They needed to be in segments to go around the curves on the journey. If they had made them in Florida, or in Louisiana, they could have been built in one piece and shipped on a barge.
But New Orleans had the ET contract and Florida the launch, so they made them in Utah to maximize the number of Congress Critters that had jobs created by Shuttle spending. They never figured the O-rings would killed anyone, it was the normal pork based procurement model, just as NASA is showing maps now illustrating all the locations contributing to the SLS/Orion.
For that matter, even Falcon 9 is sized to clear Interstate Highway bridges.
Which may explain why Blue built its factory right at the Cape. (Don’t know if they have any other launch sites in mind. Those might call for barges.)
And why the BFR is being built at the Port of Los Angeles for shipment through the Panama Canal to the launch site.
One thing I always wondered about the Falcon 9 was why Elon Musk never bought and restored the two C-133s sitting at Mojave. They were designed specifically to haul rockets around which is why they have the long fuselage.
Even better would be The new Big aircraft, or simply let it fly from LA to Florida.
The advantage of using the C-133 was that it is able to land on most runways. The runways available for the Stratolauncher are very limited.
Vandenberg is right there. DIA and Edwards are in-route. Finally, Kennedy itself.
Though with that said, I have to wonder if BFS would fit under the carrier. Both are monster crafts, but we still do not know the stratolauncher’s specs.
I was referring to the transfer of the F9. BFR will need the barge, it is just too large and heavy to go by air.
yeah. I did not realize it, but it makes the 380 look small. Pretty big.
because they were some of the worse plans made…they had serious serious problems
An illustration of engineering by zip code…
Thomas you are reaching on this. if the “joints” had snuck up and bit NASA in terms of blow by you might “might” have a complaint…but they knew about the problem(s) and simply failed to fix it. they could have fixed it which they obviously did…that decision making process was the fatal error…not the joints…sorry completely wrong here
Yes, they could have fixed it, but they wouldn’t have had the design constraints in the first place which created it if they had picked a location in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Texas to build it. You are looking at the secondary problem, but I am referring to the root cause of it. And remember, those special trains added another layer of cost.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
This is the advantage SpaceX has, it doesn’t have to constrain its engineers by zipcode requirements. Really, its no different than NASA needing to use the Super Guppy to ship the Saturn IV-B stage to the Cape for a launch.
I dont agree with him at all
He forgets that NASA also built its infrastructure to include all current NASA centers, launch pads, etc during the time from 1958 to 1969, too. They had to start from scratch.
Yep, and Vice-President, and later President Johnson, make sure to spread the wealth around to build the Congressional support. If you look at where those facilities were placed it was almost always in a district that had a Congressional member with influence in the funding of NASA.
“400,000 man years of labor” you are really going to compare slide rule labor with today’s computer modeling software and 3d Printing?
good thing they do not need to use rooms filled with “human computers” to crank out flight models… You are trying to compare building stone hedge without and with concrete, the wheel and the internal combustion engine.
Aside from busting his argument the way you laid out here is another one:
In 1969, even if the US effectively pooled its resources with the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, we could not have built an F9 block 5 for FH. No amount of money or labor in 1969 would get you to the capability of those vehicles already flying today.
Yep, I was using that as the starting point and emphasizing that in order to go from that to what Elon is promising is a massive leap. He is also hampered by high turnover and employee burnout. I know a bunch of people that have worked there and many found it exciting at first and after a while, sort of miserable. Not everybody has that same position, but the turnover rate shows that enough do that it’s an issue.
Computers help, but remember that the Apollo capsule was tiny and the mass of the payload is what drives the rest of the vehicle. A much larger vehicle requires more DV. Yes, slide rules were used, but they were used by people that had a much more intrinsic grasp of the engineering from first principles and weren’t using computer software in place of skill. Feature creep and bloat become a problem. Apollo was pretty spartan because they knew going in that the number one job of building a system to get people to and from the moon took the fore. I shudder to think of how many useless “features” will go into the BFR. I can see them thinking that the most important thing will be continuous connections to all social media for the duration and that there are enough cup holders.
btw, it was 4 million man years of labor on Apollo. 400,000 people x 10 years in rough terms.
> Yes, slide rules were used, but they were used by people that had a much more intrinsic grasp of the engineering from first principles and weren’t using computer software in place of skill.
I know people who worked on the Saturn V, and they are indeed brilliant engineers and I have nothing but respect for them. But if you think that the people at SpaceX are just pushing buttons rather than thinking, and have a less intrinsic grasp of real engineering, then you are sincerely and utterly mistaken.
[EDIT:] Oh, I see below that you think reusability is just a PR stunt. So, you’re a troll. Won’t waste my time responding further.
Nobody but SpaceX knows what its employee turnover rate is. I live about two miles, as the crow flies, from the Hawthorne plant. I run into SpaceXers fairly frequently when I’m out and about. I’ve brought up these working conditions and burnout accusations with most of them and I invariably get cynical grins and chuckles in response.
I’ve recently had some hard evidence of why this is so. A member of my extended family recently interviewed for a “factory rat” job at SpaceX. The benefits package on offer was appreciably better than anything I ever got when I was doing white collar IT work back in the day. Even SpaceX factory rats get stock options.
Engineers presumably get more. I spoke to one of them last year. He’d been at SpaceX over five years at that point. I asked about stock options. He said he’d looked into cashing in some of his but decided against it as it would have put him into Alternative Minimum Tax territory for the year.
It’s hardly any secret that SpaceX’s senior management cadre has been there from the start, or nearly so. I think SpaceX employee tenure is probably bimodal. A lot of them are in for the long haul, but there are others who can’t take the hours or the pace and drop out fairly quickly.
I think this might be a visible symptom of a national problem in lower credential employees. Construction workers, truck drivers, and mechanics are in short supply almost everywhere. Many of the people that should be filling these slots are not willing to pay the dues to reach decent pay grades. All too many got a useless (from an employment standpoint) degree with the idea that it was a “get out of hard work” card.
I suspect SpaceX is experiencing a form of this that is a glaring liability in the eyes of those that play the stat game from afar. 60 hour weeks are not a killing pace to people that are motivated in their careers. .
Quite so. I worked 60+ hours a week for a startup in my early 20’s. Fun times. Too bad it didn’t succeed but them’s the breaks. This neither burned me out nor gave me any aversion to hard work.
Hey were you one of the ones saying booster landing and re-use was a gag?
It’s a PR stunt. Several people have pointed out that it takes a significant amount of excess capacity to land and reuse the boosters which is why other companies don’t do it and I agree with them. It’s not that it hadn’t been done. Look up the Surveyor missions that preceded the manned lunar landings. Delta-Clipper, Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Unreasonable Rocket and many others. The “savings” aren’t all that much and the amount of risk of a vehicle failure goes up considerably.
Yea, and carrying landing gear takes a significant amount of excess capacity on airplanes. None of those other examples compare to what SpaceX is doing and people from Masten agree propulsive landing re-use is the way we go, ask them.
There is no way SpaceX could have pulled off the flight rate they’ve been hitting over the last couple of years without re-use. Risk goes down, as you can review the vehicle after flight and engineer the system for much higher margin. You guys lost, SpaceX and Blue understand what the future looks like.
It would be easy to find somebody as Masten to talk to. There are only a few left, but the issue isn’t how the first stage is landed, but more that it is landed at all. “You guys”? Do you mean non-fanbois? I am always skeptical when somebody is proposing something in engineering that has history going back over 100 years (not all rocketry of course, that would be a stretch). Aircraft are a different animal than rockets and have to be reused for them to make any economic sense. Launching things into space has a completely different set of requirements. Comparing the two doesn’t always produce a rational argument either way. I like what Blue Origin is doing and I hold them in higher regard since they don’t promise the moon (pun intended) and then fail constantly to deliver on their promises when they promise things will happen. BO produces when they are ready to take the next step.
If somebody is painting your car and promises to have it back to you by the first of next week, it doesn’t do you much good if it turns out to be two months late no matter how nice it turns out. It even more frustrating when the painter continues to push the finish date further and further into the future and you are promising people rides and have to keep putting them off.
I’ll have to see if Doug has a list of how many boosters have been reused. I don’t think it’s very many so they’ve been hitting the cadence they’re on with mostly new vehicles. It wasn’t until they got to this latest rev that they were going to be pushing reused cores on customers as hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Check yourself, 15 boosters in less than two years. I see how you operate, booster reuse makes sense if Blue does it but not SpaceX. That explains a lot.
interesting link. I had not seen that before.
thanx.
Wait, there are still people questioning whether vertical landing and full booster reuse are practical? That’s hilarious. Where have you been the last 3 years, under a rock?
Yes, unlike NASA they were willing to climb the experience curve and redesign as needed to achieve their goals.The F9 Block 5 is far different then the very first expendable F9 flown. NASA would still be studying if reusablity was even possible to do.
Recommend you join NSF L2.
Cheers
Those so called experts that you talked to aren’t launching commercial missions and trying to bring down the cost of launch, either. Nor do they have a vision of making humanity multiplanetary with millions living on Mars and beyond.
For the one-off government launches every other month, old space didn’t need reusable boosters. Besides, as long as the gov was willing to pay cost+, why bother, right?
Ok. Why are you complaining about it, though?
Because that is how NASA did it on the Shuttle ? One spacecraft that was suppose to do everything.
I got that idea from the pictures showing a pressure vessel for people integral to the hull with no payload bay except those pods arrayed right around the propulsion. Your proposal that SX will be developing two versions of the BFS at the same time, if true, means that a program that will already be running lean, is going to have it’s efforts divided between two prototypes. That’s crazy on crazy.
Actually you are looking at three different versions, one for passengers, one for cargo and a tanker. Kinda like that Boeing aircraft they spun off of the Dash-80, which the produced in a long haul passenger version, B707, a long haul freighter, B707, a tanker, the KC-135 and a short haul version, the B720. Seems it worked for Boeing :-).
Tom, look at the differences between those models of the 707 frame and what you said before you invoked the 707. Those changes were TINY compared to the 3 versions SX is talking about. Then ask yourself if they’re going to have all three working after 5 years of simultaneous development. 🙂 And if you do, I’ll bet you lunch, and if I win you’ll pay my fuel bill ~120 gallons of av gas to fly up to Las Vegas to collect my lunch.
They are not as different as you think. And look at the different versions of the Shuttle as a satellite launcher, a Spacelab and they were even looking at a passenger version. Here is an interesting paper on it.
https://www.aiaa.org/upload…
But let’s just wait and see what Elon Musk has up his sleeve. Comsats aren’t big and may just fit in the cargo bay of the passenger version. Remember also that the BFR has the Delta V to deploy them directly into their GE orbit slot, and return them if they aren’t working. In fact, it even has the potential, which no one is talking about, to do a repair and upgrade mission on the Hubble if NASA was so inclined to fund one.
BTW I teach at an university in Texas now, just outside of San Antonio, a lot further than Vegas is 🙂
I’m sorry Thomas, you’re wrong. We’ll both be here in 2023 and maybe one, but not two version of BFS’ will be hopping as a single stage test vehicle. And you’ll be making excuses. Probably even blaming the government. You simply don’t understand the magnitude of the effort, and that in light of the fact that it took 14 years to get Falcon 9 to where it is today, and they’re still not done making modifications, and it’s still behind schedule in its launch manifest.
Also consider where we were in early ’17 arguing over whether the Falcon H/Crew Dragon would make the 50th anni flight around the Moon for Apollo 8. Do you remember how enthusiastic the younger folks were? Think how let down they are now that they’ve been taken up and down a roller coaster by people who were jerking their chains in order to create a cheering squad. The people who visit this blog and participate in the comment section should not be led around and encouraged to think like emotive teenagers. If the space community runs itself ragged hyping one thing after another they’re going to get tired of it, and move onto something else. Space X and space today is still exciting in spite of all their lateness. It does not detract from their image at all. However a more sane set of expectations would make for a more stable and thoughtful community.
The space community always has its up and downs. I even remember the predictions for the Space Shuttle in the late 1970’s. I also remember the ups of the 1990’s when the DC-X and X-33 were going to make SSTO possible. So do folks like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, which is why, when NASA finally killed off both programs, they took matters into their own hands. BTW I was at the Churchill Club gathering in 2002 when Elon Musk first discussed SpaceX in public and promised to revolutionize space launch within a year or so. It took him a little longer, but he has done that. So it may not common on the strict schedule you want, but progress will be made and the frontier will be conquered by SpaceX, Blue Origin, or by the next generation of entrepreneurs after them, just as earlier innovators conquered earlier frontiers. And the faithful will stay with it because they know that space is the best hope humanity has to build a better future.
As the saying goes about the western frontier, the ones without dreams never started, the weak turned around or died along the way, but the survivors built a nation from sea to shining sea. Space will be no different and so I am not worried about those advocates who drop out. Sure it is nice to dream of a different world where schedules are always met, but history shows that frontiers are developed by luck, pluck and stubbornness, not PERT Charts, TRL and all the tools NASA uses for planning and micromanagement these days.
There’s little reason to hop multiple versions to test that version. The propulsion, avionics, and reentry/decent/landing systems are the same between both versions.
On the other hand, they might hop every vehicle to test it out before launching to space.
They showed the chomper cargo version last year.
They are NOT going to fly crew before dozens of missions without crew. Those missions will be launching satellites and other revenue cargo.
So there will be a cargo vehice first.
Think about that timeline, and the projected 5 year timeline of the manned flight to the Moon.
I doubt a crew flight will happen by 2023. Probably 2025.
Alternatively, they might use a special dispenser to throw smallsats out the crew hatch, or dispense them from those cargo racks at the base of the vehicle. But that won’t work for most of the revenue generating payloads like GEO commsats, so they will have to develop the cargo version anyway.
Just my point, and that will take more time and a conflict of interest between Space X’s need to make money in the established market place vs furthering the art project.
To SpaceX this is a paying customer, not an “art project”. It’s the only paying customer for BFR at the moment, as far as we know.
Developing both the cargo and crew versions is not that different than developing the fairing and Dragon versions of F9. They share almost everything behind the payload.
Well, to the paying customer, it’s an art project by his own words.
Well the BFR versions be invariant beyond the payload section? I highly doubt it. Don’t forget when Crew Dragon was shown to the public it was only a few months away from flying given it’s shared heritage to Dragon 1. That was almost 6 years ago now …. with a paying customer.
The cargo carriers in the back could also be dispensers. I can imagine one flight of cargo BFR could throw a lot of Startlink birds up. Lots of prop margin and loiter time too.
I can’t believe all the griping about timelines. Who cares if it’s 2023 or 2027? It’s gonna be a refuelable, reuseable rocket/spaceship system with a pressurized volume bigger than the ISS that can carry and land dozens and dozens of people and literally tons of payload on other planets and return them to Earth. And, so far, it’s essentially free. Friggin’ free. A national capability such as people have only dreamed about. Their entire lives.
If Musk promised to turn a rabbit into a leprechaun this coming Friday and he didn’t actually do it until Tuesday, there would a line of people, including regular posters on this blog, complaining that he didn’t do it on Friday as promised. He turned a *rabbit* into a freakin’ leprachaun! Something that doesn’t even exist. “Tut tut. Late again. Another failure by Mssr. Musk, just like I predicted!”
What amazes me is how many Americans are the ones gripping about Musk.
The man is a F***ing treasure and any nation would be so lucky to have him.
Yes, it was a huge loss to both South Africa and Canada that they failed to provide the entrepreneurial environment for him to want to stay.
Let’s be generous. Let’s call it from now until the end of 2021. First flight of the cargo version in 39.5 months? And then the crewed version 24 months after that? Consider Falcon Heavy was more months overdue than was given at initial announcement to projected first flight. Every bit of Falcon was late and it’s a fairly conventional EELV type launch vehicle with the second E dropped and the first E emphasized. Don’t be too disappointed when you spend the better part of a decade waiting for the cargo version. It’ll still be a great new technology even then.
The element that always takes the longest to develop for a rocket is the engine. SpaceX already has the engine it needs, the Raptor.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
SpaceX already has the software and sensor systems to do a VTVL for the Falcon 9 to use, and the learning from its string of failures that was used to make it work. And it has the experience of turning rockets around. There is far less technological risk for the BFR, then for the Falcon 1 as a result and SpaceX has a team with over 15 years of experience building rockets, including the very valuable experience that comes when things blowup. That is far more than NASA has, or even the old Space Contractors. That is the competitive advantage that SpaceX has and gives the BFR its credibility as a vehicle.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Fly-by is nice. Even better would be landing and staying at a Lunar Base.
One step at a time.
Who will send humans around the moon first? SLS or BFR? Can they make it in 2023?