SpaceX, is planning to start commercial flights around the moon and back before the end of next year.
The American space rocket company headed by the visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk, have revealed plans of sending two tourists on a trip around the moon and back to planet Earth by the end of 2018.
Last Monday, Musk announced the project while on a new conference over the phone, saying that their company has been approached by two private individuals who wish to circle the moon. If, or when, the trip happens, it will be the human race’s deepest venture into space in more than 40 years.
The trip would be a week-long cruise from Earth, past the surface of the moon, around it and back, without landing.
The cruise would be onboard one of SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsules, powered by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
Even though the spacecraft itself is automated, the two passenger will have to undergo intensive training for cases of emergencies.
Musk did not reveal how much such a trip will cost the travelers, but said that it would most likely be “a little bit more than the cost of a crewed mission to the space station”. The price of the Falcon Heavy alone is $90 million.
Previously, seven space tourist have paid sums of tens of millions of dollars to visit the International Space Station via Russian Soyuz rockets, which lies only around 330 to 435 kilometers above Earth. However, the SpaceX cruise would take them some 600,000 kilometers away from Earth, making it the only manned journey beyond low-Earth orbit since NASA’s Apollo moon landing in 1972.
