SpaceX shocked the spaceflight community yesterday by announcing a new ambitious goal for 2018: sending two people around the Moon. The two passengers are not NASA astronauts; they are, instead, wealthy tourists, who have already put down a “significant deposit” for the trip. If SpaceX pulls this mission off, it will be the first private company to take civilians beyond Earth orbit.
The mission also mimics a possible NASA plan. A few weeks ago, the White House asked NASA to look into the possibility of putting people on the first flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) — the giant rocket NASA is building to take astronauts into deep space and, hopefully, onto Mars. That’s a change to the original SLS flight plan, which was for an...
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