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The deadline for this moon landing is 2024; most space followers agree that it's a crazy deadline. It's 3 years away! It's even crazier when you consider that t

The deadline for this moon landing is 2024; most space followers agree that it's a crazy deadline. It's 3 years away! It's even crazier when you consider that the lander hardware has not even been designed, let alone built, tested, certified and man-rated. Blue Origin has made a few public statements about having ideas (and maybe even designs) for a lunar lander. However, given their current rate-of-progress, I doubt that they could finish it within the time remaining. SpaceX has built man-rated spacecraft; also they have extensive experience of propulsive landings and re-usable launchers. Also, they have a reputation for making fast progress. They're clearly the front-runners here and I think they're the safest bet to succeed. Still unlikely for 2024 though. Dynetics is partnered with Sierra Nevada who also have experience of building spacecraft. However their craft have never been flown manned and their speciality is in winged, aerodynamic reentry; something which is not necessary on the moon. Also, their rate of progress is glacial; I consider it very unlikely that they will be able to design, build, test and certify any kind of lunar craft before 2030 at the earliest.

101404 6y ago
Its 4.5 years to the end of 2024. Not a crazy deadline, but not easy either. Maybe with this, SpaceX will focus more on development of their actual Starship+SuperHeavy, rather than mostly focusing on mass production set-up. Anyway, this it really exciting news.
- JanSolo 6y ago
  Remember that the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions. Starship & Superheavy are not in the picture at all for this work, even though they would be able to do the job and at a much lower price. Additionally, I doubt that Starship or SuperHeavy will be ready by 2024; flying, maybe, but reliable enough for manned missions? I don't think so.
  - zipwitch 6y ago
    >* the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions* That seems overly optimistic for a system that is now a year and a half past it's original target launch date and has a current target date of late next year.
    - nickik 6y ago
      The original launch for SLS was supposed to be 2016. But I agree, the dependency on SLS is not great.
  - 101404 6y ago
    I expect there will be more than one launch system and more than one moon landing system, provided by private companies. Seems to work great for satellite launch and ISS supply mission. Why not for moon transport?
  - simonh 6y ago
    The article says that the SpaceX submission is for Starship. I think that’s doable in 4.5 years. They expect to fly and land an unmanned prototype upper stage this year. A manned upper stage up to 4 years later doesn’t seem unreasonable. They reckon the upper stage is that hardest part, the first stage should be much simpler.
    - mr_toad 6y ago
      A lot depends on the ability to refuel in orbit. To do that they’ll need multiple starships flying, and to have worked out the kinks in orbital refuelling. It might sound trivial, but it’s never been done before.
      - nickik 6y ago
        There is a reason SpaceX is not just designing one 'bespoke' rocket. Elon has said over and over again that the real challenge is producing these in large numbers and cheaply. They will actually have to prove out refueling pretty soon under the NASA contract. And SpaceX bid also includes flying the system many times until 2024. So SpaceX will have to do a lot of flights and demonstrate all this stuff to have a shot at this. So it is good that they are going right into mass production that is the only way they can prove all these different things until 2024.
- mturmon 6y ago
  When the project management at the top level is committed to unrealistic deadlines, it makes realistic engineering hard at all lower levels. Given that nature cannot be fooled, this combination of factors tends toward failure.
  - nickff 6y ago
    Kennedy committed to reaching the moon within 8.75 years in March of 1961, when the USA had a total of 15 minutes of experience in human spaceflight, all suborbital. They hadn't even decided what architecture would get them there. They succeeded, and this is far less ambitious.
    - Retric 6y ago
      The Apollo program also killed people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 Taking risks is reasonable, but in the end this is still a vanity project. IMO, figuring out how to do self sustaining spaceships / habitats is much more useful long term than going back to the moon using giant chemical rockets, stored food and oxygen etc. Even just orbiting Mars and coming back without landing would be a new achievement.
      - nickff 6y ago
        Well, if you want to know whether it's worth the risk, I think the best people to ask are the astronauts, and they are chomping at the bit to go. As far as I can see, there isn't much point to going around Mars just to go. You could just go to a high Earth orbit (or Lagrange point), and gain similar experience, with better communication. The ISS has spent 20 years in low-earth orbit; we're not going to learn much more from it or a similar station.
        Retric 6y ago
        Apollo 8 and 10 both went to the moon without landing, doing that on a multiple year mission does seem wasteful. However, there are a host of things to test. From an engineering perspective going to mars orbit means far less sunlight which means a host of new problems. An engine and fuel system to get there would be new and could also be used to send a lander for future missions. IMO, the Moon might be closer, but Mars is a much better target for long term colonization due to an atmosphere, shorter day, higher gravity, etc.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Mass production of Starship is essential to their strategy. The way in which you build a one-off rocket is totally different from how you build an assembly line of rockets. This is more true of rockets than any other industry. I'm talking about what materials are used, how they are shaped, etc. Look at all the "weird" stuff SpaceX is doing with Starship (stainless steel tanks, the types of welds they're doing, etc.) and you wouldn't want to be doing it that way unless you were manufacturing a rocket assembly line. So it seems smart to say, "why don't they just build and test one, then figure out how to manufacture it at scale?" But to do that would be even harder because you'd have to redesign everything from scratch the second time around, while maintaining component compatibility... much smarter to design for manufacturing from the get-go and treat the test articles as expendable. BTW, ULA is doing something similar with Vulcan & Centaur V. The design of the rocket itself is deeply related to the assembly line they are producing.
  - JanSolo 6y ago
    Agreed... Mass production needs to be designed-in and developed with the whole system. Related question: Just how many Starships do you think will be necessary to fulfill all our launch demands? Given that it's designed to be reusable and it has a huge payload capacity, perhaps there is less need to mass-produce them, since fewer vehicles will be able to do the same job as many expendable vehicles...?
    - garmaine 6y ago
      That's a question about demand. My goal is to move all resource extraction and heavy industry off-Earth, and to open the space frontier to permanent and self-sufficient human settlements. For that many, many Starships will be required. Note that the killer feature of Starship, IMHO, is in-space refueling. This isn't a Earth-based heavy-life vehicle... it's a re-configurable spaceship able to explore the entire solar system through fuel depot staging (with Starships themselves serving as both tankers and fuel stations).
    - greedo 6y ago
      It's not just re-usability, but turn around time as well.
jokit 6y ago
If Spacex can get Starship flying in the next three years, I would think they could meet this deadline. Unlike Mars, there aren't the same launch window requirements. Even if Starship isn't flying, Falcon Heavy is the best we have today. It would seem that if anyone is going to meet this deadline, it'll be Spacex.
- api 6y ago
  AFAIK you could do it with multiple Falcon Heavy launches (with in orbit rendezvous) and something to put a Dragon on top of that would act like the Lunar descent stage. Then you could use Dragon as the ascent and return stage. You'd probably have an orbital module too since going to/from the Moon in just a Dragon would probably be too cramped. Everything but the Dragon and the Falcon boosters would be expendable, but that's more reusability than Saturn V.
dntbnmpls 6y ago
> It's 3 years away! Or closer to 5 years away ( rounded up ) if you consider that 2024 also includes a december 31st as well as a january 1st. > It's even crazier when you consider that the lander hardware has not even been designed, let alone built, tested, certified and man-rated. You are talking about a technology that's more than 50 years old. This isn't a time or technology issue. There's plenty of time and moon landings have been done before. It's really a business issue. It seems like the industry has come up with a business case for it ( I'm guessing space tourism initially followed up by mining perhaps ).

101404 6y ago

Its 4.5 years to the end of 2024. Not a crazy deadline, but not easy either. Maybe with this, SpaceX will focus more on development of their actual Starship+SuperHeavy, rather than mostly focusing on mass production set-up. Anyway, this it really exciting news.

JanSolo 6y ago
Remember that the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions. Starship & Superheavy are not in the picture at all for this work, even though they would be able to do the job and at a much lower price. Additionally, I doubt that Starship or SuperHeavy will be ready by 2024; flying, maybe, but reliable enough for manned missions? I don't think so.
- zipwitch 6y ago
  >* the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions* That seems overly optimistic for a system that is now a year and a half past it's original target launch date and has a current target date of late next year.
  - nickik 6y ago
    The original launch for SLS was supposed to be 2016. But I agree, the dependency on SLS is not great.
- 101404 6y ago
  I expect there will be more than one launch system and more than one moon landing system, provided by private companies. Seems to work great for satellite launch and ISS supply mission. Why not for moon transport?
- simonh 6y ago
  The article says that the SpaceX submission is for Starship. I think that’s doable in 4.5 years. They expect to fly and land an unmanned prototype upper stage this year. A manned upper stage up to 4 years later doesn’t seem unreasonable. They reckon the upper stage is that hardest part, the first stage should be much simpler.
  - mr_toad 6y ago
    A lot depends on the ability to refuel in orbit. To do that they’ll need multiple starships flying, and to have worked out the kinks in orbital refuelling. It might sound trivial, but it’s never been done before.
    - nickik 6y ago
      There is a reason SpaceX is not just designing one 'bespoke' rocket. Elon has said over and over again that the real challenge is producing these in large numbers and cheaply. They will actually have to prove out refueling pretty soon under the NASA contract. And SpaceX bid also includes flying the system many times until 2024. So SpaceX will have to do a lot of flights and demonstrate all this stuff to have a shot at this. So it is good that they are going right into mass production that is the only way they can prove all these different things until 2024.
mturmon 6y ago
When the project management at the top level is committed to unrealistic deadlines, it makes realistic engineering hard at all lower levels. Given that nature cannot be fooled, this combination of factors tends toward failure.
- nickff 6y ago
  Kennedy committed to reaching the moon within 8.75 years in March of 1961, when the USA had a total of 15 minutes of experience in human spaceflight, all suborbital. They hadn't even decided what architecture would get them there. They succeeded, and this is far less ambitious.
  - Retric 6y ago
    The Apollo program also killed people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 Taking risks is reasonable, but in the end this is still a vanity project. IMO, figuring out how to do self sustaining spaceships / habitats is much more useful long term than going back to the moon using giant chemical rockets, stored food and oxygen etc. Even just orbiting Mars and coming back without landing would be a new achievement.
    - nickff 6y ago
      Well, if you want to know whether it's worth the risk, I think the best people to ask are the astronauts, and they are chomping at the bit to go. As far as I can see, there isn't much point to going around Mars just to go. You could just go to a high Earth orbit (or Lagrange point), and gain similar experience, with better communication. The ISS has spent 20 years in low-earth orbit; we're not going to learn much more from it or a similar station.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Apollo 8 and 10 both went to the moon without landing, doing that on a multiple year mission does seem wasteful. However, there are a host of things to test. From an engineering perspective going to mars orbit means far less sunlight which means a host of new problems. An engine and fuel system to get there would be new and could also be used to send a lander for future missions. IMO, the Moon might be closer, but Mars is a much better target for long term colonization due to an atmosphere, shorter day, higher gravity, etc.
garmaine 6y ago
Mass production of Starship is essential to their strategy. The way in which you build a one-off rocket is totally different from how you build an assembly line of rockets. This is more true of rockets than any other industry. I'm talking about what materials are used, how they are shaped, etc. Look at all the "weird" stuff SpaceX is doing with Starship (stainless steel tanks, the types of welds they're doing, etc.) and you wouldn't want to be doing it that way unless you were manufacturing a rocket assembly line. So it seems smart to say, "why don't they just build and test one, then figure out how to manufacture it at scale?" But to do that would be even harder because you'd have to redesign everything from scratch the second time around, while maintaining component compatibility... much smarter to design for manufacturing from the get-go and treat the test articles as expendable. BTW, ULA is doing something similar with Vulcan & Centaur V. The design of the rocket itself is deeply related to the assembly line they are producing.
- JanSolo 6y ago
  Agreed... Mass production needs to be designed-in and developed with the whole system. Related question: Just how many Starships do you think will be necessary to fulfill all our launch demands? Given that it's designed to be reusable and it has a huge payload capacity, perhaps there is less need to mass-produce them, since fewer vehicles will be able to do the same job as many expendable vehicles...?
  - garmaine 6y ago
    That's a question about demand. My goal is to move all resource extraction and heavy industry off-Earth, and to open the space frontier to permanent and self-sufficient human settlements. For that many, many Starships will be required. Note that the killer feature of Starship, IMHO, is in-space refueling. This isn't a Earth-based heavy-life vehicle... it's a re-configurable spaceship able to explore the entire solar system through fuel depot staging (with Starships themselves serving as both tankers and fuel stations).
  - greedo 6y ago
    It's not just re-usability, but turn around time as well.

jokit 6y ago

If Spacex can get Starship flying in the next three years, I would think they could meet this deadline. Unlike Mars, there aren't the same launch window requirements. Even if Starship isn't flying, Falcon Heavy is the best we have today. It would seem that if anyone is going to meet this deadline, it'll be Spacex.

api 6y ago
AFAIK you could do it with multiple Falcon Heavy launches (with in orbit rendezvous) and something to put a Dragon on top of that would act like the Lunar descent stage. Then you could use Dragon as the ascent and return stage. You'd probably have an orbital module too since going to/from the Moon in just a Dragon would probably be too cramped. Everything but the Dragon and the Falcon boosters would be expendable, but that's more reusability than Saturn V.

dntbnmpls 6y ago

> It's 3 years away! Or closer to 5 years away ( rounded up ) if you consider that 2024 also includes a december 31st as well as a january 1st. > It's even crazier when you consider that the lander hardware has not even been designed, let alone built, tested, certified and man-rated. You are talking about a technology that's more than 50 years old. This isn't a time or technology issue. There's plenty of time and moon landings have been done before. It's really a business issue. It seems like the industry has come up with a business case for it ( I'm guessing space tourism initially followed up by mining perhaps ).