I want to go to the moon.
Discussion
I'm mid-40's and I do not want to, or can't pay $m's for the privilege.
When will I be able to get onto Skyscanner (other potential Moon visit resellers are available...) and look for a short break; Spain, Las Vegas, Moon...and check the "Moon" box?
I'm not talking about a two week holiday. Just land, bounce around a bit and get back in time for dinner.
How close is an affordable day trip to the Moon (affordable in the way nice cars, houses and holidays are "affordable" to the average person)? (baring in mind a trip to Australia 100 years ago was a 6-month affair).
When will I be able to get onto Skyscanner (other potential Moon visit resellers are available...) and look for a short break; Spain, Las Vegas, Moon...and check the "Moon" box?
I'm not talking about a two week holiday. Just land, bounce around a bit and get back in time for dinner.
How close is an affordable day trip to the Moon (affordable in the way nice cars, houses and holidays are "affordable" to the average person)? (baring in mind a trip to Australia 100 years ago was a 6-month affair).
I doubt it in your lifetime.
If money was no object, then probably in your lifetime, but you have specifically said you don't have millions to spend.
Don't forget,we don't currently have rockets that can even get people to the moon and back.
Current cost per person to get to the Space Station is around 50 million at the moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-cre...
If money was no object, then probably in your lifetime, but you have specifically said you don't have millions to spend.
Don't forget,we don't currently have rockets that can even get people to the moon and back.
Current cost per person to get to the Space Station is around 50 million at the moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-cre...
Olivergt said:
I doubt it in your lifetime.
If money was no object, then probably in your lifetime, but you have specifically said you don't have millions to spend.
Don't forget,we don't currently have rockets that can even get people to the moon and back.
Current cost per person to get to the Space Station is around 50 million at the moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-cre...
Yusaku Maezawa has bought a free return trajectory flight to the Moon this decade.If money was no object, then probably in your lifetime, but you have specifically said you don't have millions to spend.
Don't forget,we don't currently have rockets that can even get people to the moon and back.
Current cost per person to get to the Space Station is around 50 million at the moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-cre...
We know that the flight must have cost considerably less than his $2 billion net worth. If we have an upper bound of $1 billion and a lower bound of $150 million then that puts the per seat cost at around $100-15 million per seat, I would estimate a 2025 date.
If we then take some reasonable approximations for Starship costs:
I doubt that the first generation Starships will last more than 10 missions without maintenance equal to construction. Despite Elon's claim that they will be super cheap I will also ascribe a cost per dry tonne of $1 million which is about what an airliner costs.
Cost for each launch paperwork, fuel and paying the bills for SpaceXs payroll will be $5 million. That comes to $30 million a launch ($250 million/10 for vehicle) and you will need 2 to do a flyby and 7 to land.
You will however be able to share the launch with around 100 other people. So that comes to ~$600,000 to do a flyby and $2.1 million to land. This would be around 2030-35 ish.
If after a few years the vehicle manages 100 flights per heavy maintenance and we halve the per launch costs while doubling the passenger numbers we get to $5 million a launch and 200 people.
So we are down to about $50k to flyby and $175k to land. I'd estimate that the earliest this is happening is 2035-40.
From that point onwards space tourism is likely to trend towards being 2-6 times the cost of the energy required like all other forms of transport. Which would put the minimum cost of the flyby in the region of $10k.
All that I'm doing is restating what advocates of reusable space craft have been saying since the 60's. If you can reuse the space craft the cost of fuel isn't that high your flights can be cheap if you can get the launch rates up.
So far we know that we can do reusability, we don't know if we can get demand for launches up. SpaceX hasn't for example stimulated more launches with their low prices. Instead they have created their own demand with space internet.
However we are a long way from having enough stuff to fill multiple reusable Starships. You would only need 20-30 launches a year to support a 40,000 satellite global constellation.
Space tourism may have the potential to drive greater volumes of flights however the sticking point is likely to be that at the moment spaceflight carries a significant risk of killing you. Spacecraft are delicate and don't have mass to allocate to robustness or redundancy (safety is never built on just reliability).
It may be that we need a significant technology change to really make spaceflight a mass market endeavour. It may be that environmental concerns put a ceiling on how many launches we can have and that stops the price falling.
In summary I would suggest that if you really want to it may be possible to go into space either as a trip of a lifetime (or end of lifetime) or as paid professional in the burgeoning space tourism market.
I doubt very much that we will see settlement of Mars, I suspect that the experience would be more akin to a long stretch in the world's harshest prison whereas I can see the rich and famous hanging out in low earth orbit or at the moon.
Ultimately all the world's endeavours are a bid to impress the opposite sex.
Try this first and see if you like it:
https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/
I heard it’s made from cheese.
https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/
I heard it’s made from cheese.
Talksteer said:
Olivergt said:
I doubt it in your lifetime.
If money was no object, then probably in your lifetime, but you have specifically said you don't have millions to spend.
Don't forget,we don't currently have rockets that can even get people to the moon and back.
Current cost per person to get to the Space Station is around 50 million at the moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-cre...
Yusaku Maezawa has bought a free return trajectory flight to the Moon this decade.If money was no object, then probably in your lifetime, but you have specifically said you don't have millions to spend.
Don't forget,we don't currently have rockets that can even get people to the moon and back.
Current cost per person to get to the Space Station is around 50 million at the moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-cre...
We know that the flight must have cost considerably less than his $2 billion net worth. If we have an upper bound of $1 billion and a lower bound of $150 million then that puts the per seat cost at around $100-15 million per seat, I would estimate a 2025 date.
...
I'm not quite sure what the point would be of just doing flybys though?
5 years is not very long in space flight timescales, so you have references for the space craft that they might be using? I would have thought that the planning and even construction/testing would have started by now to achieve a 2025 launch date.
Talksteer said:
Yusaku Maezawa has bought a free return trajectory flight to the Moon this decade.
We know that the flight must have cost considerably less than his $2 billion net worth. If we have an upper bound of $1 billion and a lower bound of $150 million then that puts the per seat cost at around $100-15 million per seat, I would estimate a 2025 date.
If we then take some reasonable approximations for Starship costs:
I doubt that the first generation Starships will last more than 10 missions without maintenance equal to construction. Despite Elon's claim that they will be super cheap I will also ascribe a cost per dry tonne of $1 million which is about what an airliner costs.
Cost for each launch paperwork, fuel and paying the bills for SpaceXs payroll will be $5 million. That comes to $30 million a launch ($250 million/10 for vehicle) and you will need 2 to do a flyby and 7 to land.
You will however be able to share the launch with around 100 other people. So that comes to ~$600,000 to do a flyby and $2.1 million to land. This would be around 2030-35 ish.
If after a few years the vehicle manages 100 flights per heavy maintenance and we halve the per launch costs while doubling the passenger numbers we get to $5 million a launch and 200 people.
So we are down to about $50k to flyby and $175k to land. I'd estimate that the earliest this is happening is 2035-40.
From that point onwards space tourism is likely to trend towards being 2-6 times the cost of the energy required like all other forms of transport. Which would put the minimum cost of the flyby in the region of $10k.
All that I'm doing is restating what advocates of reusable space craft have been saying since the 60's. If you can reuse the space craft the cost of fuel isn't that high your flights can be cheap if you can get the launch rates up.
So far we know that we can do reusability, we don't know if we can get demand for launches up. SpaceX hasn't for example stimulated more launches with their low prices. Instead they have created their own demand with space internet.
However we are a long way from having enough stuff to fill multiple reusable Starships. You would only need 20-30 launches a year to support a 40,000 satellite global constellation.
Space tourism may have the potential to drive greater volumes of flights however the sticking point is likely to be that at the moment spaceflight carries a significant risk of killing you. Spacecraft are delicate and don't have mass to allocate to robustness or redundancy (safety is never built on just reliability).
It may be that we need a significant technology change to really make spaceflight a mass market endeavour. It may be that environmental concerns put a ceiling on how many launches we can have and that stops the price falling.
In summary I would suggest that if you really want to it may be possible to go into space either as a trip of a lifetime (or end of lifetime) or as paid professional in the burgeoning space tourism market.
I doubt very much that we will see settlement of Mars, I suspect that the experience would be more akin to a long stretch in the world's harshest prison whereas I can see the rich and famous hanging out in low earth orbit or at the moon.
Ultimately all the world's endeavours are a bid to impress the opposite sex.
Did anyone else read this in the voice of Bricktop? We know that the flight must have cost considerably less than his $2 billion net worth. If we have an upper bound of $1 billion and a lower bound of $150 million then that puts the per seat cost at around $100-15 million per seat, I would estimate a 2025 date.
If we then take some reasonable approximations for Starship costs:
I doubt that the first generation Starships will last more than 10 missions without maintenance equal to construction. Despite Elon's claim that they will be super cheap I will also ascribe a cost per dry tonne of $1 million which is about what an airliner costs.
Cost for each launch paperwork, fuel and paying the bills for SpaceXs payroll will be $5 million. That comes to $30 million a launch ($250 million/10 for vehicle) and you will need 2 to do a flyby and 7 to land.
You will however be able to share the launch with around 100 other people. So that comes to ~$600,000 to do a flyby and $2.1 million to land. This would be around 2030-35 ish.
If after a few years the vehicle manages 100 flights per heavy maintenance and we halve the per launch costs while doubling the passenger numbers we get to $5 million a launch and 200 people.
So we are down to about $50k to flyby and $175k to land. I'd estimate that the earliest this is happening is 2035-40.
From that point onwards space tourism is likely to trend towards being 2-6 times the cost of the energy required like all other forms of transport. Which would put the minimum cost of the flyby in the region of $10k.
All that I'm doing is restating what advocates of reusable space craft have been saying since the 60's. If you can reuse the space craft the cost of fuel isn't that high your flights can be cheap if you can get the launch rates up.
So far we know that we can do reusability, we don't know if we can get demand for launches up. SpaceX hasn't for example stimulated more launches with their low prices. Instead they have created their own demand with space internet.
However we are a long way from having enough stuff to fill multiple reusable Starships. You would only need 20-30 launches a year to support a 40,000 satellite global constellation.
Space tourism may have the potential to drive greater volumes of flights however the sticking point is likely to be that at the moment spaceflight carries a significant risk of killing you. Spacecraft are delicate and don't have mass to allocate to robustness or redundancy (safety is never built on just reliability).
It may be that we need a significant technology change to really make spaceflight a mass market endeavour. It may be that environmental concerns put a ceiling on how many launches we can have and that stops the price falling.
In summary I would suggest that if you really want to it may be possible to go into space either as a trip of a lifetime (or end of lifetime) or as paid professional in the burgeoning space tourism market.
I doubt very much that we will see settlement of Mars, I suspect that the experience would be more akin to a long stretch in the world's harshest prison whereas I can see the rich and famous hanging out in low earth orbit or at the moon.
Ultimately all the world's endeavours are a bid to impress the opposite sex.
Olivergt said:
So you are saying that in 5 years time, there will be spacecraft going to the moon, maybe not landing, but going there and back.
I'm not quite sure what the point would be of just doing flybys though?
There are people who would be willing to do it. Plenty of "experiences" that people pay for don't involve stopping en route and getting out of the vehicle.I'm not quite sure what the point would be of just doing flybys though?
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