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Until now, in the history of humanity, 12 people – all men, all NASA astronauts – have walked on the moon. Twelve other people – again, all NASA men and astronauts – skirted it without ever setting foot on the surface. This second issue could be about to increase, now that Elon Musk has promised to send around our celestial neighbor aboard SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and six to eight artists. (Musk had already promised to put a tourist around the moon by the end of 2018. This time, he said the race will run in 2023.)
Maezawa will pay for the pleasure cruise, with probably a large share of his multi-billion dollar fortune. But whatever the sum paid (it has not been disclosed), it will allow him to acquire, for himself and his group, a rare view of the moon, but no landing or excursion on the lunar surface.
Indeed, as difficult as launching humans into lunar orbit safely, it's basically about designing a crew vehicle that can keep people alive and go down into the atmosphere and build a rocket big enough go. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX’s Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond]
Landing on the moon is much more complicated.
Why can not SpaceX just unload its vehicle on the moon?
If you watched the Apollo landings on television in the late 1960s and early 1970s (or one of the movies made later), you saw that the control module – the ship carrying the astronauts the moon.
Instead, each successful landing forced two astronauts to climb into the Lunar Module (LM) – a kind of light and space-based dinghy – and drive it to the lunar surface while a third astronaut was waiting in the module. After each moonwalk, the astronauts would return to the LM and return to space, where their third companion would pick them up for return to Earth.
This was not always the plan, however. In the early days of the Apollo project, NASA engineers seriously considered trying to put the entire control module on the moon. But they soon realized that a command module that could land on the moon, return to space, propel itself to Earth, and survive the back-to-back season should be unpredictable, even with Apollo mission standards.
The SpaceX BFR is expected to be more powerful than the Apollo missions' Saturn V rocket, but not much. The company released a promotional video in early 2018 showing a simulated BFR crew vehicle landing on the moon like this, but did not release any technical information suggesting that it would overcome the technical challenges involved.
NASA, of course, gave up on the project to overcome these challenges in the 1960s. Thus, the idea of a disposable and ultra light landing gear for moonwalks was born.
Why can not SpaceX build its own lunar lander?
In fact, in theory, there is no obvious and obvious reason for SpaceX. After all, the company has managed many difficult land landings that NASA could never have dreamed of in the 1960s. And Musk has claimed – whether judiciously or not – that his company will land one day on Mars.
But the reality is that, if history is a guide, the design and construction of a lunar lander is a totally separate project that accounts for much of the cost of building a rocket that can reach the moon in the first place .
Between 1963 and 1973, NASA's Lunar Module program cost $ 2.24 billion, compared to $ 3.73 billion for the control module and $ 6.42 billion for the Saturn V. inflation, the lander cost about $ 17 billion in 2018 dollars. Its design, as Chief Engineer Thomas Kelly said in a 2012 book on the effort, was a matter of endless reduction to make the module light enough for the trip.
The original design of the LG, writes Kelly, involved a seated cockpit with wide glass windows, so that astronauts could watch their descent to the lunar surface in all its scenic splendor. By the time they were stripped for their first unmanned flight aboard Apollo 5 in January 1968, they contained only one small triangular window and cable hoists to snap in place of seats for keep the astronauts standing. By the time NASA performed a crew test with a lunar module in low Earth orbit aboard Apollo 9 in 1969, astronauts had dubbed it "Spider", thanks to its extraterrestrial multi-legged appearance .
This LG design carried only two astronauts at a time to the moon, although later models managed to handle larger cargo loads. A SpaceX LG is likely to safely carry its extra paying passenger on the lunar surface, at least slightly more comfortable and safer than the NASA winches and the reduced navigation and docking systems offered.
And this happens to the biggest obstacle preventing SpaceX from giving its passengers a real lunar excursion.
In the end, the problem is the people
If SpaceX's goal was to explore the moon, which at least was the goal of NASA in the '60s and' 70s, the company could have more options. Experienced and highly trained astronauts can travel in limited craft, forcing everyone to participate in the project of landing, exploring, launching and docking, while looking through a tiny triangular window to find their way.
But no matter what level of training SpaceX passengers receive prior to their trip, they will not be there as space pilots, nor experts in the use of space suits or other technical procedures involved in the flight. # 39; landing. This means that if SpaceX tried to put people on the moon, they would be essentially dead weights, throughout the race and place, while expert astronauts and automated systems would meet the many technical challenges.
This means that a SpaceX theoretical lander would have to carry a lot more bodies, probably more comfortable and safer, than a carrier of NASA-like teams of experts and equipment for scientific research. Instead, tourists will at best be left in space, where they can enjoy the moon but will have little to do in terms of groundbreaking exploration.
Originally published on Live Science.
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