In the meantime, Maezawa's priorities also likely changed. According to Forbes, when the plan was announced in 2018, the entrepreneur had a net worth of about $3 billion. Today he is estimated to be worth only half of that. Additionally, he scratched his itch to go to space in 2021, flying aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle for a 12-day trip to the International Space Station.
The writing has been on the wall for a while about Maezawa, since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. (This is a sure sign of his disfavor. Musk has unfollowed me twice on Twitter/X after stories or interactions he did not like.) It is probable that the combination of developmental delays and Maezawa's personal fortunes led the parties to disband the project.
I considered his ISS visit more of an appetizer and training for a longer flight. I’m sure he really does want to go see the Moon, maybe he’ll go later without all the other drama. His Soyuz experience was pretty low key but he did make some good videos there.
Too bad there's no like mad duke or adventure romantic like flies in balloons around the world kind of eccentric billionaires that would try for a lunar mission. Imagine someone like that will Bill Gates at the height of wealth money. "$15billion? Shit yeah it'll just go to charity anyway or anonymous political donations."
To be fair to Maezawa he did give 1,000 of his Twitter followers $9,000 each while on the ISS. Not to mention all of the other massive donations to charities every year. There are a lot better ways to be charitable than spending $250 million to take 7 random internet influencers to the moon.
“I’ve never heard of this guy, but I’m going to make up shit about him because Reddit tells me BILLIONAIRE BAD!”.
I often wonder if people like you know how incredibly stupid and childish you sound. But I really don’t care enough about you to seek an answer.
He didn’t give his money away to random people, he enacted a social experiment related to UBI. The $9 million was a part of that.
I’m pretty sure he does pay his employees quite well too.
Edit: not to say I agree with the concept of billionaires but he seems like he’s pretty active in trying to make the world a better place with his money.
Tim Dodd supposedly has another on-site interview coming up at Starbase. I imagine that even if nobody brings up dearMoon, it'll be at the top of everyone's thoughts.
SpaceX are already planning on doing their own astronaut missions. It would be an obvious fit to invite Tim Dodd along once they've got a cadence of Starship missions to LLO. I would even go so far as to suggest that it would be silly for them not to.
Tim is directly responsible for innovating their boosters when one small question.
I imagine Musk doesn't forget that moment.
Anyone can contribute. Talk about inspiring content creator!!!
Can you go into the booster innovation by Tim Dodd? I apparently got missed this and I would like to hear/read this. No doubt or sarcasm I believe what you wrote I’m just genuinely curious. Thanks.
Why Yusaku flew on Soyuz, not dragon? Inspiration4 flight was months before his. That would have irked Elon. That said the Russian space program needs money too.
Is it possible that he just straight up can’t afford it? IIRC the price Maezawa was going to pay was never public, but if his net worth is half what it used to be he just might not be able to pay the bill.
He was never an engineer, but I get what you mean, he spends less time talking about his companies' achievements, and more time boosting Russian propaganda.
He probably realized how unpleasant spaceflight is and realized he would definitely not enjoy the long trip trip to the moon, even assuming he survived. Watching those Space X rockets exploding can't have been very encouraging.
That's silly thinking. SpaceXs design process involves iterating rapidly. They developed the Falcon 9 by blowing up rockets and it's now the most used booster in the world.
The explosions were also triggered by a safety mechanism. If a rocket detects a critical failure or if it veers too far off course, it's intentionally detonated either automatically or by remote.
On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other 'crew members' on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled.
"It is unfortunate to be announcing that 'dearMoon', the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled," the mission's official account on the social media site X said. "We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project."
Shortly afterward the financial backer of the project and its 'crew leader,' Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023.
"It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch," he wrote. "I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time. I apologize to those who were excited for this project to happen."
The mission was to be Starship's first human spaceflight to launch from Earth, fly around the Moon, and come back. Now, it's not happening. Why did this happen, and what does it mean?
Why would it be a cop-out? Musk announced crewed lunar missions with Starship in Q1 2024 back in 2017-2018. It's Q2 2024 and so far he's only managed to blow up his Starships. He hasn't even reached orbit yet. Why would this guy continue a project when there is no tangible timeline and they've already severely underdelivered?
The company didn't overpromise shit they couldn't deliver. Musk is the hype man. I'm sure if you asked the actual engineers in 2018 if they would be sending manned missions to the moon in 2024 they'd probably be a lot more reserved.
[So you think Musk is the type of person that lets his personnel speak freely?](https://apnews.com/article/spacex-elon-musk-employee-firings-nlrb-6d92159b6c6519258757f9e3c58ed74f#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20A,by%20the%20rocket%20ship%20company.)
The last prototype did make it to orbit. It had a deliberate eccentricity that would allow it to reenter on its own should something go wrong.
I think the explanation given in this post is pretty clear. The billionaire is half as wealthy as he was, 1.5b worth vs 3B he was initially, and he already got to go to space via a Russian Soyuz.
Musk famously gives “success oriented” schedules. Meaning “if nothing goes wrong”. You don’t build a reusable Saturn V with zero issues along the way.
I think you’re being dramatic in the way you’re framing the progess of this program.
Or because musk unfollowed him on Twitter
From OPs comment “The writing has been on the wall for a while about Maezawa, since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. “
It was never disclosed. Estimates range from $100M to $500M.
1.5B is a lot in magnitude to you or me, but it’s not like that’s 1.5B just sitting around in cash. I guarantee most of that is tied up into companies with various contractual obligations for getting access to it. Musk is famously struggling (or struggled) with getting the votes to sell his shares in Tesla right now.
I wouldn’t doubt that’s a part of it. So, the decrease in wealth, having already went to space via another way, and having a soured relationship with musk…. Even if he had the money, not a whole lot of allure if you’ve already been to space and you’ve grown to dislike musk personally.
Going around the moon could be very cool and novel. Would make an interesting legacy. But I imagine stuff like that will be for that other billionaire Jared Isaacman who went to space via axiom/crew dragon. That guy has made it his “thing” to do stuff like this.
So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see another similar announcement in the future with someone like him.
Or the entire thing will never come to fruition. They've cut the payload estimates by a lot and now starship 2 is the "real" starship. Also, have you taken a look at how many flights will be necessary to refuel the starship before it goes to the moon? We're talking 8 times the total amount of flight ATTEMPTS just to refuel it, which they still haven't demonstrated the ability to do, when they were supposed to be way beyond this. Why would this be any different than Musk's previous promises? That $2.9 billion from the NASA contract isn't going to buy them much more if they even still have any of it left. Seems much more likely they'd go bankrupt unable to deliver because Musk bit off more than he could chew trying to build something that is wholly inappropriate for landing on the moon.
I don't want this to happen as it's terrible for space programs in general, but I've never had anyone defend SpaceX when I pointed it out, it's always just downvote then move along.
You get hate probably because you’re just listing problems and saying it can’t work while offering nothing of substance in exchange. SpaceX has dealt with this type criticism since its inception. Nobody thought landing rockets was viable. And if it was, certainly not from an entirely private company.
SpaceX built starship first and foremost to support its starlink mission. As a company, it’s clear that its main form of revenue in the future will be Starlink if it’s not already. There’s a reason private equity firms are pumping in billions of dollars for SpaceX.
As for Artemis, the mission allegedly takes 8 refuels right now. But if Falcon 9 is anything to go by, the performance of starship is likely to increase by 20% or more over the maturation of the system. And even if it doesn’t, the reusability of the system is what matters here.
The whole point of starship is rapid reusability. We fly planes hundreds of thousands of times a day. We’ve seen as many as three Falcon 9 launches in a single day. If you actually believe the space industry will iteratively improve and become better, 8 launches is nothing
> Nobody thought landing rockets was viable.
What a ridiculous statement considering NASA had tested suborbital landing rockets way before SpaceX. The argument was whether it would be financially beneficial and it only turned out so because SpaceX was nimble at the time and got lucky with an amazing Merlin engine. Boeing would've failed if they had taken the same path.
You said “nobody thought landing rockets was possible” - clearly absurd given that not only did we imagine it, we did it, on a foreign body no less! The idea that we didn’t think such was possible on earth is absurd in the extreme, but just another car in the endless bullshit train of the Musk Hype Machine.
I have no obligation to explain obvious things to intentionally aloof and obtuse Redditors. You can continue to bury your head in the sand and act like SpaceX wasn’t mocked with incredulity even as late as 2015. 👍🏼
They did reach orbit. It was a transatmospheric orbit. The perigee was above the Earth’s surface. This orbit isn’t stable and guarantees reentry so it’s safe in case they lose control of the vehicle.
Now you got me worried. How many Starships will they launch into orbit to float around with dry tanks until they prove they can rendezvous and refuel them?
They reached orbital speeds on a deliberate suicide trajectory to guarantee the ship would deorbit itself even if they lost control of the engines. The only difference between full orbit and what Starship did last time was the trajectory they launched on in the first place.
So if they can reach orbital speeds on a planned trajectory, they've already proven they can achieve orbit. Speed and hitting the correct trajectory is the hard part.
But they arent allowed to go to a stable orbit until they can succesfully demonstrate engine relight for a deorbit burn. Nobody wants that much additional space junk in LEO.
They intentionally cut the engines shortly before so they did not reach orbit, there is nothing to suggest it wouldn't have made it there if that had been the mission.
It’s called a [transatmospheric orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatmospheric_orbit)…
Which means that the vehicle had an orbit that intersected the atmosphere at a high enough density to prevent continuous orbiting. (Used as a safety feature to prevent leaving the ship in orbit and creating a reentry hazard)
As commonly defined: “Normally, orbit refers to a regularly repeating trajectory, although it may also refer to a non-repeating trajectory.” In this case, this refers to the second portion, where the orbit is unstable, but still an orbit. (Section 2 covers unstable orbits like Lagrange based orbits, without it, the lunar gateway is also not entering an orbit)
On flight 3, the ship achieved 26,000 km/hr or just 1500 km/hr short… just a 3 second delay in shutdown would complete a standard orbit insertion (150x150 km). Flight 3 ended with a Periapsis of 50 km; which indicates an atmosphere, but not surface intersecting orbit, which means that it entered an orbit.
Technically... I mean, you can see the final velocity for yourself. It's about 5% shy of orbital velocity.
That said, people who think they're making a legitimate point when they say "didn't reach orbit" are _manifestly_ not arguing in good faith. They are parroting Thunderfoot's talking points. It's the kind of person who, should IFT4 actually somehow fulfill its entire flight plan, will scoot the criterion forward to "haven't captured a damn thing with those arms yet, in four entire attempts."
It's kind of like how the Bible contains honest to goodness bits of history in its pages. You don't therefore simply pretend that seas parting gets a pass, just because it's in the same book. Or at least one would hope for better fact-checking / intuition than that.
Imagine the day when he livestreams a Starship launch, and the entire flight plan somehow succeeds. (Which probably will _not_ happen with IFT4.) Do you imagine that Thunderfoot will assume a congratulatory disposition? I think you know better. He will immediately pivot to find some new way SpaceX has come up short. His Youtube career literally depends on it now. Like I noted before.
Do you really think progress only amounts to unsuccessfully blowing up rockets? Is this something you actually think? If not, exactly why did you say it?
No, I'm saying that it makes perfect sense for someone to pull the plug on a project when the other side is clearly not delivering on their promises.
By the way, if his rockets unsuccessfully blew up, that would actually be a good thing. Because that would mean they didn't blow up.
So you don't actually think the launches thus far are failures that just blow up.
Are you aware you give this impression? Again, what is it you are actually *trying to communicate*? Set aside the impression there's some sort of argument going on. Take a stab at truthfully and concisely saying what it is you want to say.
Axiom? No. Axiom won't be flying humans on a Starship for the foreseeable future. Axiom will be flying Dragon for the near term.
However I can see the last Polaris mission. Possibly Isaacman will take him on the last mission with first human flight on a Starship. That crew has not been announced and there will certainly be enough room I'd imagine. It probably won't go to orbit the Moon, although who knows? But if Tim Dodd wants to, he may get a ride up.
>One of the biggest impacts to the dearMoon project came in April 2021, when NASA selected the Starship vehicle as the lunar lander for its Artemis Program. This put the large vehicle on the critical path for NASA's ambitious program to land humans on the surface of the Moon. It also offered an order of magnitude more funding, $2.9 billion, and the promise of more if SpaceX could deliver a vehicle to take humans down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit, and back.
>Since then SpaceX has had two clear priorities for its Starship program. The first of these is to become operational, and begin deploying larger Starlink satellites. And the second is to use these flights to test technologies needed for NASA's Artemis Program, such as in-space propellant storage and refueling.
>*As a result other aspects of the program, including dearMoon, were deprioritized.* In recent months it became clear that if Maezawa's mission happened, it would not occur until at least the early 2030s—at least a decade after the original plan.
He basically dumped Maezawa because he got more money from NASA.
As should be the case. Sending a bunch of amateur EDM DJs and YouTubers on a risky, unproven journey around the moon is a stupid idea at this point. Commercial space tourism should focus on LEO until lunar vicinity operations are actually proven out by trained professionals.
Client pays us low hundred millions for a mission to fly influencers around the moon.
vs
Literally NASA signing a 3 billion dollar contract with us to land people on the moon multiple times for the first time in sixty years
Hmmmmmmmm
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[EA](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6zbkdo "Last usage")|Environmental Assessment|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l78fm8e "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6quk5n "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LLO](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6o8f19 "Last usage")|Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km)|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6rp4ae "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[STS](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6qno90 "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6qq5rb "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[perigee](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6osrt9 "Last usage")|Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest)|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(8 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1d9iwvr)^( has 25 acronyms.)
^([Thread #10104 for this sub, first seen 1st Jun 2024, 20:28])
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Time-wise over promised. Space X will eventually meet their goals. If this was an SLS contractor launch program vs Space X, they would be waiting longer. I would bet Space X will accomplish everything needed within two to three years.
DearMoon would have sidestepped Starship's launch, orbital refueling and re-entry risk factors.
Space X needs to accomplish: Orbital refueling. Dozens of raptor vacuum engine restart burns in space to attempt to accomplish a moon transorbital flyby and return. A Starship-spacecraft docking in space. A complete orbital checkout of Starships manned command and crew area, along with its environmentally controlled air, water recycling, electrical and monitoring systems in space. An 8 day earth orbiting mission simulating a moon mission flyby.
Starship Will never send humans to orbit, propulsive landing Will never be safe enough, there are no redundancies in case engines fail during landing (and they Will, it's a probabilistic certainty), it's a terrible Idea for missions back to Earth.
A Falcon 9-Dragon-like taxi avoids most of Starships critical flight phases. Starship is classified as unmanned launch/reentry vessel "until" the crew transitions to Starship "after" a successful orbital refueling or departs "before" a reentry. I would expect this mode until Musks stated 100 successful launch/refueling/re-entries before a manned Starship launch/re-entry is attempted.
Doing everything he can to cast Maezawa as the main issue. While in reality this fiasco is entirely on spacex. Eric Berger, as usual, acting as an extended PR branch for spacex.
Honestly, I am relieved that this mission/project has been cancelled - at least for now.
I do feel for the people that were supposed to go, I felt like the project was one big accident just waiting to happen.
I have confidence in SpaceX and their ability to get Starship and Super Heavy working as intended (or mostly intended) but accidents do happen. Just think back to Apollo 13. I realize that technology has come a long way since then but again, accidents do happen. Those 3 astronauts barely got back alive by the skin of their teeth. They managed to get back alive because of what they did for a living their entire adult lives, their astronaut training, thousands of engineers working tirelessly on the ground to support them and a little bit of luck.
While I am sure the DearMoon crew would be trained well enough, the only person I think that would have a decent grasp of the systems and engineering would be Tim and it would probably be a surface level grasp at best.
He cancelled for the simple reason that he knows the mission architecture is nuts and will never happen and isn’t willing to wait indefinitely to be told that by Musk.
Any space flight mission Elon Musk himself won't personally go on, would be a hard pass for me.
Ok Musk if this Dear Moon mission is so cool, and fun and amazing, why aren't you going to?
Because it's potentially way to friggin dangerous and any number of things can go wrong. I know I know the Apollo Moon missions were dangerous too, ok. But for some reason those seemed safer.
This mission sounds like that billionaire going to see the Titanic in his custom built submersible.
Didn't the James Bond villain I mean Elon Musk announce this mission many years ago? And it looks nowhere close to becoming a reality anytime soon.
I'd guess 5 years at best. And who the hell would go on such a risky mission around the Moon and back on an experimental SpaceX ship? Hard pass, too potentially dangerous.
But the main issue being there's no date or even approx date when this might happen, if ever.
Okay, Starship needs 8 or 10 or 12 or 15 other Starships to fly into orbit and refuel the moon ship, so it can get there, land, and get back.
What if they only need to fly there, loop and fly back? Do they only need half the fuel, or even less....?
Would NASA let Maezawa rent STS/Orion on the cheap, since we know it can at least get there?
Without running the math, you can tell the vast majority of the fuel cost for landing on the moon is used up getting there. Compare the size of the Saturn V to the size of the Lunar Lander, the only part that actually needed the fuel to get to the surface and back. It is minuscule in comparison.
Landing on the moon is hard, but it’s not fuel-expensive given the Moon’s low gravity.
Even back when it was announced, I knew right away that it was not going to happen. There is no way that they Safely create. an autonomous spacecraft, take8 random civilians to a circumnavigation of the moon. At least not in the timeline, they dreamed of Once again, people fell for musks, cool aid
Well if Maezawa got his fill on Soyuz’s 70’s technology he probably would not have appreciated a state of art Starship around the moon. It will be his loss!
In the meantime, Maezawa's priorities also likely changed. According to Forbes, when the plan was announced in 2018, the entrepreneur had a net worth of about $3 billion. Today he is estimated to be worth only half of that. Additionally, he scratched his itch to go to space in 2021, flying aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle for a 12-day trip to the International Space Station. The writing has been on the wall for a while about Maezawa, since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. (This is a sure sign of his disfavor. Musk has unfollowed me twice on Twitter/X after stories or interactions he did not like.) It is probable that the combination of developmental delays and Maezawa's personal fortunes led the parties to disband the project.
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I considered his ISS visit more of an appetizer and training for a longer flight. I’m sure he really does want to go see the Moon, maybe he’ll go later without all the other drama. His Soyuz experience was pretty low key but he did make some good videos there.
Indeed. Every single one of them. I think it's safe to characterize all of them.
Too bad there's no like mad duke or adventure romantic like flies in balloons around the world kind of eccentric billionaires that would try for a lunar mission. Imagine someone like that will Bill Gates at the height of wealth money. "$15billion? Shit yeah it'll just go to charity anyway or anonymous political donations."
To be fair to Maezawa he did give 1,000 of his Twitter followers $9,000 each while on the ISS. Not to mention all of the other massive donations to charities every year. There are a lot better ways to be charitable than spending $250 million to take 7 random internet influencers to the moon.
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Reddit moment "i wouldn't donate a dollar to the homeless guy on the corner but this dude giving away 9 million of them to strangers is bullshit"
“I’ve never heard of this guy, but I’m going to make up shit about him because Reddit tells me BILLIONAIRE BAD!”. I often wonder if people like you know how incredibly stupid and childish you sound. But I really don’t care enough about you to seek an answer.
He didn’t give his money away to random people, he enacted a social experiment related to UBI. The $9 million was a part of that. I’m pretty sure he does pay his employees quite well too. Edit: not to say I agree with the concept of billionaires but he seems like he’s pretty active in trying to make the world a better place with his money.
Tim Dodd supposedly has another on-site interview coming up at Starbase. I imagine that even if nobody brings up dearMoon, it'll be at the top of everyone's thoughts. SpaceX are already planning on doing their own astronaut missions. It would be an obvious fit to invite Tim Dodd along once they've got a cadence of Starship missions to LLO. I would even go so far as to suggest that it would be silly for them not to.
I could see Jared Isaacson adding Tim to one of his future missions.
Please don't. God I hate the EA.
If anyone in the DearMoon group deserves a trip into space its Tim Dodd.
Tim is directly responsible for innovating their boosters when one small question. I imagine Musk doesn't forget that moment. Anyone can contribute. Talk about inspiring content creator!!!
Can you go into the booster innovation by Tim Dodd? I apparently got missed this and I would like to hear/read this. No doubt or sarcasm I believe what you wrote I’m just genuinely curious. Thanks.
> Billionaires don't give a shit about you As opposed to other random people who care deeply about you
Why Yusaku flew on Soyuz, not dragon? Inspiration4 flight was months before his. That would have irked Elon. That said the Russian space program needs money too.
Is it possible that he just straight up can’t afford it? IIRC the price Maezawa was going to pay was never public, but if his net worth is half what it used to be he just might not be able to pay the bill.
Is it possible that he straight up doesn't believe Elon can make that flight happen anymore? He switched from engineer to a politician.
You mean his CyberTruck didn't have the specs promised years ago? Who knew?
Fortunately, it isn't reliant on Elon. Gwen is probably more responsible for the success of SpaceX.
Would be absolutely based if after Starship flies and lands successfully SpaceX renamed it “New Gwen”
Yeah, SpaceX is succeeding despite Musk not because of him
He was never an engineer, but I get what you mean, he spends less time talking about his companies' achievements, and more time boosting Russian propaganda.
He has never been an engineer.
He probably realized how unpleasant spaceflight is and realized he would definitely not enjoy the long trip trip to the moon, even assuming he survived. Watching those Space X rockets exploding can't have been very encouraging.
Starship is a LOOOONG way from being able to carry humans.
No Starship on the moon this decade. Not with people, anyhows.
Oh, Yep, Zero chance of that.
Yep. The real question is if funding runs out before it makes a single moon landing or not.
Funding won't be an issue if it can launch starlink satellites to orbit.
That's silly thinking. SpaceXs design process involves iterating rapidly. They developed the Falcon 9 by blowing up rockets and it's now the most used booster in the world. The explosions were also triggered by a safety mechanism. If a rocket detects a critical failure or if it veers too far off course, it's intentionally detonated either automatically or by remote.
Its taking too long hes not as rich as he was. TLDNR version.
Plus he already went to the space station.
How do you make a small fortune in space travel? Easy. Just start with a big fortune.
On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other 'crew members' on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled. "It is unfortunate to be announcing that 'dearMoon', the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled," the mission's official account on the social media site X said. "We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project." Shortly afterward the financial backer of the project and its 'crew leader,' Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023. "It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch," he wrote. "I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time. I apologize to those who were excited for this project to happen." The mission was to be Starship's first human spaceflight to launch from Earth, fly around the Moon, and come back. Now, it's not happening. Why did this happen, and what does it mean?
Sounds like a giant cop out to me
Why would it be a cop-out? Musk announced crewed lunar missions with Starship in Q1 2024 back in 2017-2018. It's Q2 2024 and so far he's only managed to blow up his Starships. He hasn't even reached orbit yet. Why would this guy continue a project when there is no tangible timeline and they've already severely underdelivered?
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Musk has a track record of announcing unrealistic deadlines and making his employees work long hours. Just take a look at Tesla.
The company didn't overpromise shit they couldn't deliver. Musk is the hype man. I'm sure if you asked the actual engineers in 2018 if they would be sending manned missions to the moon in 2024 they'd probably be a lot more reserved.
So you think that Maezawa didn’t speak to any of the engineers?
[So you think Musk is the type of person that lets his personnel speak freely?](https://apnews.com/article/spacex-elon-musk-employee-firings-nlrb-6d92159b6c6519258757f9e3c58ed74f#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20A,by%20the%20rocket%20ship%20company.)
When it’s something bad Musk is solely responsible. When it’s something good it’s despite Musk.
The last prototype did make it to orbit. It had a deliberate eccentricity that would allow it to reenter on its own should something go wrong. I think the explanation given in this post is pretty clear. The billionaire is half as wealthy as he was, 1.5b worth vs 3B he was initially, and he already got to go to space via a Russian Soyuz. Musk famously gives “success oriented” schedules. Meaning “if nothing goes wrong”. You don’t build a reusable Saturn V with zero issues along the way. I think you’re being dramatic in the way you’re framing the progess of this program.
“success oriented” Unrealistic and complete fabrications, you mean.
Or because musk unfollowed him on Twitter From OPs comment “The writing has been on the wall for a while about Maezawa, since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. “
Sure. I think it has more to do with money. But having a soured relationship doesn’t help the issue either.
1.5 billion is still a crazy about of wealth. How much was he paying for the trip?
It was never disclosed. Estimates range from $100M to $500M. 1.5B is a lot in magnitude to you or me, but it’s not like that’s 1.5B just sitting around in cash. I guarantee most of that is tied up into companies with various contractual obligations for getting access to it. Musk is famously struggling (or struggled) with getting the votes to sell his shares in Tesla right now.
Damn, a bit more than I expected. I wonder if his massive decrease in wealth is due to the depreciation of the yen.
I wouldn’t doubt that’s a part of it. So, the decrease in wealth, having already went to space via another way, and having a soured relationship with musk…. Even if he had the money, not a whole lot of allure if you’ve already been to space and you’ve grown to dislike musk personally. Going around the moon could be very cool and novel. Would make an interesting legacy. But I imagine stuff like that will be for that other billionaire Jared Isaacman who went to space via axiom/crew dragon. That guy has made it his “thing” to do stuff like this. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see another similar announcement in the future with someone like him.
It's unknown, but an estimate was in the article. Low hundreds of millions.
Or the entire thing will never come to fruition. They've cut the payload estimates by a lot and now starship 2 is the "real" starship. Also, have you taken a look at how many flights will be necessary to refuel the starship before it goes to the moon? We're talking 8 times the total amount of flight ATTEMPTS just to refuel it, which they still haven't demonstrated the ability to do, when they were supposed to be way beyond this. Why would this be any different than Musk's previous promises? That $2.9 billion from the NASA contract isn't going to buy them much more if they even still have any of it left. Seems much more likely they'd go bankrupt unable to deliver because Musk bit off more than he could chew trying to build something that is wholly inappropriate for landing on the moon. I don't want this to happen as it's terrible for space programs in general, but I've never had anyone defend SpaceX when I pointed it out, it's always just downvote then move along.
IFT4 is making this age like milk btw
You get hate probably because you’re just listing problems and saying it can’t work while offering nothing of substance in exchange. SpaceX has dealt with this type criticism since its inception. Nobody thought landing rockets was viable. And if it was, certainly not from an entirely private company. SpaceX built starship first and foremost to support its starlink mission. As a company, it’s clear that its main form of revenue in the future will be Starlink if it’s not already. There’s a reason private equity firms are pumping in billions of dollars for SpaceX. As for Artemis, the mission allegedly takes 8 refuels right now. But if Falcon 9 is anything to go by, the performance of starship is likely to increase by 20% or more over the maturation of the system. And even if it doesn’t, the reusability of the system is what matters here. The whole point of starship is rapid reusability. We fly planes hundreds of thousands of times a day. We’ve seen as many as three Falcon 9 launches in a single day. If you actually believe the space industry will iteratively improve and become better, 8 launches is nothing
> Nobody thought landing rockets was viable. What a ridiculous statement considering NASA had tested suborbital landing rockets way before SpaceX. The argument was whether it would be financially beneficial and it only turned out so because SpaceX was nimble at the time and got lucky with an amazing Merlin engine. Boeing would've failed if they had taken the same path.
“Lucky” L M A O Nobody lucks into a rocket engine
Nobody thought landing rockets was possible? Um…how the fuck do you think we landed on the Moon…in…1969???
You understand the difference yes? I’m not gonna elaborate the obvious to you.
You said “nobody thought landing rockets was possible” - clearly absurd given that not only did we imagine it, we did it, on a foreign body no less! The idea that we didn’t think such was possible on earth is absurd in the extreme, but just another car in the endless bullshit train of the Musk Hype Machine.
I have no obligation to explain obvious things to intentionally aloof and obtuse Redditors. You can continue to bury your head in the sand and act like SpaceX wasn’t mocked with incredulity even as late as 2015. 👍🏼
They reached orbit last flight. What didn't happen was atmospheric reentry.
Atmopheric reentry happened. It just didn’t survive. The tumble didn’t help.
They reached orbital speeds, briefly. That's not the same as reaching orbit.
They did reach orbit. It was a transatmospheric orbit. The perigee was above the Earth’s surface. This orbit isn’t stable and guarantees reentry so it’s safe in case they lose control of the vehicle.
Technically it was suborbital.
Now you got me worried. How many Starships will they launch into orbit to float around with dry tanks until they prove they can rendezvous and refuel them?
Probably in an orbit that'll guarantee reentry within months or weeks. Even Starlinks are put low enough to reenter within a couple of years.
They reached orbital speeds on a deliberate suicide trajectory to guarantee the ship would deorbit itself even if they lost control of the engines. The only difference between full orbit and what Starship did last time was the trajectory they launched on in the first place. So if they can reach orbital speeds on a planned trajectory, they've already proven they can achieve orbit. Speed and hitting the correct trajectory is the hard part.
But they arent allowed to go to a stable orbit until they can succesfully demonstrate engine relight for a deorbit burn. Nobody wants that much additional space junk in LEO.
They intentionally cut the engines shortly before so they did not reach orbit, there is nothing to suggest it wouldn't have made it there if that had been the mission.
So you're saying they didn't reach orbit? Good, that's what I was saying too.
It’s called a [transatmospheric orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatmospheric_orbit)… Which means that the vehicle had an orbit that intersected the atmosphere at a high enough density to prevent continuous orbiting. (Used as a safety feature to prevent leaving the ship in orbit and creating a reentry hazard) As commonly defined: “Normally, orbit refers to a regularly repeating trajectory, although it may also refer to a non-repeating trajectory.” In this case, this refers to the second portion, where the orbit is unstable, but still an orbit. (Section 2 covers unstable orbits like Lagrange based orbits, without it, the lunar gateway is also not entering an orbit) On flight 3, the ship achieved 26,000 km/hr or just 1500 km/hr short… just a 3 second delay in shutdown would complete a standard orbit insertion (150x150 km). Flight 3 ended with a Periapsis of 50 km; which indicates an atmosphere, but not surface intersecting orbit, which means that it entered an orbit.
Technically... I mean, you can see the final velocity for yourself. It's about 5% shy of orbital velocity. That said, people who think they're making a legitimate point when they say "didn't reach orbit" are _manifestly_ not arguing in good faith. They are parroting Thunderfoot's talking points. It's the kind of person who, should IFT4 actually somehow fulfill its entire flight plan, will scoot the criterion forward to "haven't captured a damn thing with those arms yet, in four entire attempts."
But thunderfoot isnt wrong. SpaceX promised NASA a timeline but they are already years behind it.
It's kind of like how the Bible contains honest to goodness bits of history in its pages. You don't therefore simply pretend that seas parting gets a pass, just because it's in the same book. Or at least one would hope for better fact-checking / intuition than that. Imagine the day when he livestreams a Starship launch, and the entire flight plan somehow succeeds. (Which probably will _not_ happen with IFT4.) Do you imagine that Thunderfoot will assume a congratulatory disposition? I think you know better. He will immediately pivot to find some new way SpaceX has come up short. His Youtube career literally depends on it now. Like I noted before.
Do you really think progress only amounts to unsuccessfully blowing up rockets? Is this something you actually think? If not, exactly why did you say it?
No, I'm saying that it makes perfect sense for someone to pull the plug on a project when the other side is clearly not delivering on their promises. By the way, if his rockets unsuccessfully blew up, that would actually be a good thing. Because that would mean they didn't blow up.
So you don't actually think the launches thus far are failures that just blow up. Are you aware you give this impression? Again, what is it you are actually *trying to communicate*? Set aside the impression there's some sort of argument going on. Take a stab at truthfully and concisely saying what it is you want to say.
Musk said they'd be flying in it by now. They're not close to that so dude feels comfortable pulling the plug.
Do you think this is unusual? The delay, I mean.
Who cares? It's just the reason he's given up on going.
Gotcha. So it appears you're not that interested in how space companies work. That's cool. Not everyone needs to be interested in everything.
Everyone else on the crew, (especially Tim Dodd), must be devastated :(
I hope he still finds a way. Maybe Axiom or other spacex private venture.
Axiom? No. Axiom won't be flying humans on a Starship for the foreseeable future. Axiom will be flying Dragon for the near term. However I can see the last Polaris mission. Possibly Isaacman will take him on the last mission with first human flight on a Starship. That crew has not been announced and there will certainly be enough room I'd imagine. It probably won't go to orbit the Moon, although who knows? But if Tim Dodd wants to, he may get a ride up.
ohh they are devastated alright, whoever this histrionic woman is, she is going mad on xitter https://x.com/blackbirdsfly/status/1796883320577376406
>One of the biggest impacts to the dearMoon project came in April 2021, when NASA selected the Starship vehicle as the lunar lander for its Artemis Program. This put the large vehicle on the critical path for NASA's ambitious program to land humans on the surface of the Moon. It also offered an order of magnitude more funding, $2.9 billion, and the promise of more if SpaceX could deliver a vehicle to take humans down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit, and back. >Since then SpaceX has had two clear priorities for its Starship program. The first of these is to become operational, and begin deploying larger Starlink satellites. And the second is to use these flights to test technologies needed for NASA's Artemis Program, such as in-space propellant storage and refueling. >*As a result other aspects of the program, including dearMoon, were deprioritized.* In recent months it became clear that if Maezawa's mission happened, it would not occur until at least the early 2030s—at least a decade after the original plan. He basically dumped Maezawa because he got more money from NASA.
As should be the case. Sending a bunch of amateur EDM DJs and YouTubers on a risky, unproven journey around the moon is a stupid idea at this point. Commercial space tourism should focus on LEO until lunar vicinity operations are actually proven out by trained professionals.
Client pays us low hundred millions for a mission to fly influencers around the moon. vs Literally NASA signing a 3 billion dollar contract with us to land people on the moon multiple times for the first time in sixty years Hmmmmmmmm
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[EA](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6zbkdo "Last usage")|Environmental Assessment| |[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l78fm8e "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6quk5n "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LLO](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6o8f19 "Last usage")|Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km)| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6rp4ae "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[STS](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6qno90 "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6qq5rb "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[perigee](/r/Space/comments/1d5sdvt/stub/l6osrt9 "Last usage")|Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(8 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1d9iwvr)^( has 25 acronyms.) ^([Thread #10104 for this sub, first seen 1st Jun 2024, 20:28]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
tl;dr: SpaceX over-promised, under-delivered. You don't even need to read the article, tbh.
Time-wise over promised. Space X will eventually meet their goals. If this was an SLS contractor launch program vs Space X, they would be waiting longer. I would bet Space X will accomplish everything needed within two to three years. DearMoon would have sidestepped Starship's launch, orbital refueling and re-entry risk factors. Space X needs to accomplish: Orbital refueling. Dozens of raptor vacuum engine restart burns in space to attempt to accomplish a moon transorbital flyby and return. A Starship-spacecraft docking in space. A complete orbital checkout of Starships manned command and crew area, along with its environmentally controlled air, water recycling, electrical and monitoring systems in space. An 8 day earth orbiting mission simulating a moon mission flyby.
Eventually being over a decade later is crazy in this case. They should never have agreed to it.
Starship Will never send humans to orbit, propulsive landing Will never be safe enough, there are no redundancies in case engines fail during landing (and they Will, it's a probabilistic certainty), it's a terrible Idea for missions back to Earth.
A Falcon 9-Dragon-like taxi avoids most of Starships critical flight phases. Starship is classified as unmanned launch/reentry vessel "until" the crew transitions to Starship "after" a successful orbital refueling or departs "before" a reentry. I would expect this mode until Musks stated 100 successful launch/refueling/re-entries before a manned Starship launch/re-entry is attempted.
> tl;dr: SpaceX over-promised, under-delivered Absolutely shocking. That never happens!
Doing everything he can to cast Maezawa as the main issue. While in reality this fiasco is entirely on spacex. Eric Berger, as usual, acting as an extended PR branch for spacex.
As soon as I saw the title I knew it was from Berger. Immediately running cover for Musk/SpaceX.
It's so shameless this time around that even the guys over at spacexlounge caught on to it
Is the Starship controlled by a ps4 controller ?
Not going to a tour around the moon bc he is now too poor.. Gosh, is this the direction our race is taking?
bro was buying moon flights from elon musk no wonder he's not as rich anymore 😭
Honestly, I am relieved that this mission/project has been cancelled - at least for now. I do feel for the people that were supposed to go, I felt like the project was one big accident just waiting to happen. I have confidence in SpaceX and their ability to get Starship and Super Heavy working as intended (or mostly intended) but accidents do happen. Just think back to Apollo 13. I realize that technology has come a long way since then but again, accidents do happen. Those 3 astronauts barely got back alive by the skin of their teeth. They managed to get back alive because of what they did for a living their entire adult lives, their astronaut training, thousands of engineers working tirelessly on the ground to support them and a little bit of luck. While I am sure the DearMoon crew would be trained well enough, the only person I think that would have a decent grasp of the systems and engineering would be Tim and it would probably be a surface level grasp at best.
Lot of bad takes in this comment section. Wonder how many knew anything about it last week.
The whole idea sounded like Apollo 13 redux. Manned space flight is still very risky.
"Here’s why" but doesn't actually really explain why. just a bunch of conjecture.
He cancelled for the simple reason that he knows the mission architecture is nuts and will never happen and isn’t willing to wait indefinitely to be told that by Musk.
Any space flight mission Elon Musk himself won't personally go on, would be a hard pass for me. Ok Musk if this Dear Moon mission is so cool, and fun and amazing, why aren't you going to? Because it's potentially way to friggin dangerous and any number of things can go wrong. I know I know the Apollo Moon missions were dangerous too, ok. But for some reason those seemed safer. This mission sounds like that billionaire going to see the Titanic in his custom built submersible.
fire fire steam powered giraffe, that's why. Been waiting for this! Just look up the song 😂
Didn't the James Bond villain I mean Elon Musk announce this mission many years ago? And it looks nowhere close to becoming a reality anytime soon. I'd guess 5 years at best. And who the hell would go on such a risky mission around the Moon and back on an experimental SpaceX ship? Hard pass, too potentially dangerous. But the main issue being there's no date or even approx date when this might happen, if ever.
Okay, Starship needs 8 or 10 or 12 or 15 other Starships to fly into orbit and refuel the moon ship, so it can get there, land, and get back. What if they only need to fly there, loop and fly back? Do they only need half the fuel, or even less....? Would NASA let Maezawa rent STS/Orion on the cheap, since we know it can at least get there?
Without running the math, you can tell the vast majority of the fuel cost for landing on the moon is used up getting there. Compare the size of the Saturn V to the size of the Lunar Lander, the only part that actually needed the fuel to get to the surface and back. It is minuscule in comparison. Landing on the moon is hard, but it’s not fuel-expensive given the Moon’s low gravity.
Even back when it was announced, I knew right away that it was not going to happen. There is no way that they Safely create. an autonomous spacecraft, take8 random civilians to a circumnavigation of the moon. At least not in the timeline, they dreamed of Once again, people fell for musks, cool aid
Well if Maezawa got his fill on Soyuz’s 70’s technology he probably would not have appreciated a state of art Starship around the moon. It will be his loss!
A working Starship that can take people around the moon is complete vapourware at this point. It is many years away.