SpaceX announces BFR lunar passenger, mission for Earth’s...
- by NASASpaceFlight.com
- Sep 17, 2018
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Maezawa will invite six to eight artists of different professional and personal backgrounds – artists who represent the whole of humanity – to join him on the lunar flyby mission… with the only stipulation to their involvement being that they create works thereafter that “inspire the dreamer in all of us.”
“I thought about how [this flight] could contribute to world peace,” said Maezawa.
The BFR artist-filled flight will launch on its roughly six day mission No Earlier Than (NET) 2023 – a date Mr. Musk cautioned in the following Q&A session was not set in stone.
The flight will only launch after the completion of BFR hopper tests, which Mr. Musk confirmed are still targeted to begin next year.
After that, the BFR will move on to larger scale tests – with Mr. Musk noting that the entire BFR system will be tested in an uncrewed configuration before Maezawa and his fellow passengers embark on their voyage around the moon.
Lunar flight profile – via SpaceX
Whether or not SpaceX will fly an uncrewed BFR on a lunar free return trajectory mission – flying the exact profile it will with Maezawa and his passengers – before Maezawa’s mission has not yet been determined.
What is known is that the flight is expected to reach a distance from Earth of between 500,000 to 650,000 km (310,685 to 403,890 mi), making Maezawa and his passengers the farthest-travelling humans from Earth.
The current record was set on 15 April 1970 by the three-person crew of Apollo 13, who made it 400,171 km (248,655 mi) from Earth as their crippled craft swung around the dark side of the moon.
During the BFR flight, Maezawa – and certainly some of his other passengers – will become the first non-Americans to travel to the moon.
People that may ride on the BFR flight.
Notable is the fact that Maezawa wishes to take people whose professions have – to date – prevented them from accessing space.
The world’s federal space agencies have always mandated a background in some kind of scientific field for minimum consideration in the astronaut corps – excluding artists of all kinds whose fields lay outside engineering and science.
That now stands to change with BFR and signals a synergy between SpaceX and Maezawa in terms of using the BFR architecture to make space accessible to everyone.
Switching the lunar passenger flight from Falcon Heavy to BFR:
Originally, Maezawa had purchased from SpaceX a circumlunar voyage to be completed using the company’s Crew Dragon atop
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket – which conducted its highly successful maiden flight on 6 February 2018 from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center
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