 Hey guys, it's Amy, and now SpaceX has come out announcing that it will send people to the moon by the end of 2018 in a different Apollo 8-style mission. You guys guessed it, I have feelings, therefore it is soapbox time. So one of my biggest frustrations with SpaceX isn't about how the company does its rocket tree because it does build rockets that work, so that's always a good thing. The problem with SpaceX, as somebody who covers or has in the past more than now covered space news, is that because SpaceX is privately funded, it doesn't have to actually say much of anything. Right? NASA's a public company beholden to taxpayers like myself, therefore NASA has to tell me all of the things that I want to know that aren't classified. SpaceX on the other hand is completely private and doesn't actually have to say anything, which means the press conference about this new lunar mission actually does say, like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind driven by the universal human spirit of exploration. That gives me no information, and that is the first paragraph of the press release. I mean, I did do a postgraduate certificate in public relations and corporate communications, and we were always told not to get into flowery details right off with that in the press release, but I digress. As for actual mission details, the crew in this case will be two private citizens. They have not yet been named, but apparently they do know each other, which is good since they are going to sit in the relatively small, crewed version of the Dragon capsule for at least eight days. The mission will launch from NASA's Pad 39A, which is where all the Apollo missions to the Moon launched from, with the exception of Apollo 10, which left from Pad 39B. The crew will fly faster than any humans have before, which doesn't actually say how fast. There is an article from The Verge that says the mission will skim the Moon's surface, which doesn't really say anything about the altitude from the Moon's surface, but I imagine it's close, but obviously not touching, because if it did going faster than any humans before, that would just be a bad day. Try doing that in Kerbal Space Program. Scott Manley will tell you that it is just going to end in epic disasters and explosions, but you know, in Kerbal, fun explosions. In real life, not fun explosions. And after passing by the Moon, the crew will go between 300 and 400,000 miles away from the Earth before looping back to come back home. That's all it says about the mission, and then the SpaceX news release adds that there will probably be some biomedical experiments or fitness data gathered on the flight. So as you can kind of guess from the lack of science details described in the press release about this mission, there isn't really a science component to this mission. Rather, there is a very large money component. Apparently the two private citizens have already made a very significant financial down payment on the flight. They haven't actually disclosed how much the mission is going to cost, or how much the two private citizens are paying to be passengers on the mission, but Musk said that it is comparable, more or less, to NASA buying tickets on a Soyuz rocket up to the International Space Station, which as a point of reference is about $80 million a seat. And the two private citizens are going to start training for their mission later this year, which gives them a little over a year to get ready to fly to the moon. So again, that's an indication that there's not really going to be a lot of hard science involved. They are going to be passengers. They're going to be along for a ride and have a really spectacular view, frankly, I'm jealous of that bit. But they aren't really going to be flying the mission or actively participating in the flight beyond payloads, and maybe gathering some biomedical data or fitness data or some other human factors data that could parlay into a later program. The mission will be entirely automated. Again, the astronauts are not NASA astronauts who have been training for years, who are engineers, who are pilots who have that background. They are private citizens with a lot of money who will have a really spectacular view for about eight days, maybe 10, depending on exactly the mission trajectory. No, the really interesting thing about this flight is how SpaceX will go about making it an automated mission. Now, automated spacecraft are nothing new. We've sent more spacecraft without humans on board to interesting destinations on insane trajectories than we have anything with people on board. We generally send people up to the International Space Station, which is like NASCAR for space, just making orbits. It's easier to get there, say then to get to Pluto doing multiple gravity assists and mid-course corrections. But even in those cases there are humans involved, right? Every time the new horizon spacecraft had to make a trajectory adjustment, there was a whole crew of scientists and engineers having meetings, figuring out exactly how to make those changes, and then sending the commands up to the computer, and then the computer would execute it. So the question is whether SpaceX will do something like that, or whether they will actually train the astronauts, slash private citizens turned to astronauts to do any kind of work with the systems on board for these kinds of trajectory nudges and mid-course corrections. So the real question becomes, why is this mission a thing? I mean, you don't need humans on board to do an interesting trajectory. You check you don't need to send humans to the moon to gather biomedical data. You don't really need this mission to happen at all. But it is, as Musk said, a significant driver of revenue into SpaceX. These kinds of privately funded missions could actually be a huge source of revenue for a private space company. There seems to be a point where people get so wealthy that they get bored of what they have access to on the Earth and want to go into space. So maybe these private missions, like going to the moon without having to actually do any of the work, just really taking a risk to ride on a rocket and being a passenger on a largely automated mission. It could be that these missions to space, which are more exotic than just a flight up into Earth orbit, or even, of course, just a suborbital flight. I mean, going to the moon is way more exciting than a suborbital space flight mission. It could be that these will become such an important source of revenue for SpaceX that Musk really does need the money to get his missions to Mars, namely, get himself to Mars. Within the timeframe of sort of the mid-century or earlier than that, about 2040. So maybe the purpose of this mission is really just for SpaceX to get another source of revenue to develop bigger concepts like all of the technology it needs for going to Mars. So I guess that's enough of a reason to go to the moon with tourists? I mean, this is sort of a whole other realm of space tourism that hasn't existed until now and really doesn't exist currently. It exists in potentia. I mean, we can look forward to maybe 100 years from now, 200 years from now, when we have access to other planets and other moons around other planets, and this becomes the vacation. We could actually take a summer on Europa or something. Maybe that is the future, but apparently, the small-scale version of that is very much on the horizon, which is private missions to the moon. And maybe it's enough to take these kinds of risks and fund these kinds of missions if it's funded by the person who's going. So there may not really be a reason for this mission to go beyond revenue for SpaceX, and I guess that's enough of a reason to go to the moon? SpaceX has already made the connection, and anybody who knows anything about space will also very quickly make this connection that this mission sounds a lot like a private version of Apollo 8. Apollo 8 was a mission that launched on December 21st of 1968. Three astronauts, Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman, went to the moon, orbited 10 times, and then came back to slash down on December 27th. This mission played a vital role in NASA getting to the moon by the end of the 1960s, the challenge that President Kennedy had set in 1961. There's no real reason to do a mission like that outside of the context of Apollo. If you'd like to hear more about my thoughts on that, specifically, check out this video right here where I talk about it in great length. So it's interesting to note that this announcement from SpaceX comes just days after NASA announced a similar intention to launch astronauts to the moon on another Apollo 8-style mission with its first Orion SLS flight at the end of 2018. Now, this might actually explain why NASA is suddenly so keen on going back to the moon. Maybe it's not just Trump trying to have his own Kennedy moment and do something inspirational and grand for the sake of humanity. No, maybe it's NASA actually trying to keep pace with SpaceX. It's never really had a private company running neck and neck with it because a private company can take a lot more risks than a government company can in this current climate. But I also don't totally think it would be the case that NASA would see SpaceX as enough of a competitor to actually launch a seriously competing mission. I mean, the NASA Moon mission and the SpaceX Moon mission are basically the exact same mission. If anything, I would say the SpaceX one has more of a rationale to get off the ground because no bucks, no buck Rogers, you need money to make your rockets fly and that's something that NASA is very much lacking in this day and age. So what are my thoughts about SpaceX potentially going to the moon at the end of next year? Well, SpaceX can do what it wants. It's not using taxpayer money. If these two private citizens want to spend their millions or billions, probably of dollars, to get a rocket off the ground and to take a joy ride to the moon, then no one can really stop them. It's also worth noting that this flight would have to be sanctioned and approved by the FAA. Whether that could happen or what would stop that, I don't know. So there are a few hurdles for SpaceX to jump through before this mission can actually leave the ground. It's also worth noting that SpaceX is kind of notorious for missing its initial deadlines. But to be fair, they are working with things like massive rockets and spaceflight, neither of which are exactly easy. Target flights for manned missions to the ISS have been pushed back as have rocket launches and Musk originally wanted to send crews to Mars by the early 2020s and that's looking increasingly unrealistic. Although Mars is, of course, still Elon Musk's big goal. So final thoughts on SpaceX going to the moon? It's a private company and private citizens using their own money to go somewhere. I mean, they can do what they want. They could fly around the world. They could fly to the moon. You've got money. You can go where that money will take you. That's just kind of how money works here. But very much like my thoughts about NASA deciding to maybe go to the moon in 2018 just for the sake of going to the moon in 2018, I kind of want to see missions to the moon be building to something. I mean, again, rich people can do whatever they want with all of their money. That's, I can't tell them not to do that. But it would be really great if this mission was actually helping build something bigger, something that would push all of humanity outward more into space. But I don't know. I'm on team. I like science. So I want to see more interplanetary missions, discovering things that we don't know about other planets and about distant moons so that when we actually have the technology to really send humans beyond low Earth orbit and beyond the moon, that we actually know where we're going, that we're not just going to Mars because it's there, that maybe we're going to Europa because it turns out there's something really amazing there that humans need to be in situ to discover. I mean, that's the way I would like to see us approaching spaceflight, not just putting astronauts or rich people on rockets for the sake of inspiration so they can carry the hope of humanity with them going to the moon. But that's just my thoughts. And you know what? I'm on my soapbox, so I'm allowed to have my thoughts. But now I want to hear your guys' thoughts because I know you're going to sound off in the comments. Do you think a mission like this, just private citizens buying their way to the moon because they have the money, do you think there's any value in this as a mission? Is it inspirational? Is it kind of sticking it to the rest of us who can't afford to just take a tourist trip to the moon? Or is it actually going to do some good for the next generation of kids to inspire them to be great engineers or maybe just inspire them to marry old billionaires and then take that money and go to the moon themselves someday? Let me know what you think about this mission and about the whole new venue of private spaceflight and space tourism doing things like going to the moon because this is a whole, whole new thing beyond Virgin Galactic and suborbital flights. I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is my personal channel where I am very opinionated and don't hold back nearly as much. If you would like weekly videos that are very much just straight-up space history educational little nuggets about all the weirdo fun things I find in archives through my research, be sure to check out my main channel, Vintage Space. Every week is a new little tidbit that you probably didn't know about space history. And of course, if you want daily-ish updates from me about things space and other, be sure to follow me on Twitter and on Instagram. And finally, if you want weekly ranty vlogs of me on my soapbox because I do have feelings and opinions about all these new things happening in space, be sure to subscribe right here so you never miss a video.