Elon Musk Wants Space Tourists to Fly on SpaceX's New Ride for NASA

Elon Musk sees a shiny and busy destiny for SpaceX's newly debuted crew dragon pill.

Crew dragon released to orbit for the primary time ever this morning (March 2), kicking off an uncrewed, six-day demonstration venture to the global area station (ISS) referred to as demo-1. if all goes nicely with this flight and an upcoming emergency-break out take a look at, crew dragon ought to fly two NASA astronauts to the orbiting lab this summer season.

Operational missions, which would bring four people according to experience, might begin someday thereafter.

The vehicle's close to-time period destiny involves ferrying NASA Space flyers, and astronauts from ISS companion countries, to and from the station. SpaceX has been developing group dragon below a $2.6 billion commercial-team contract with NASA, in any case. however, over the longer haul, Musk said, he'd want to open crew dragon to area tourists as nicely.

"Human beings have long gone to area station on Soyuz," he stated this morning throughout a publish-release press convention here at NASA's Kennedy space center, relating to the handful of personal citizens who have flown aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft (and reportedly plunked down between $20 million and $40 million apiece to do so).

And I think it'd be quite cool if humans went to the space station on an American automobile as nicely," Musk added. "I suppose that is something that we will do, and NASA's very supportive of that."

looking even farther out, "maybe there's something past area station," he stated. "we will see."

musk's grand plan, of the path, includes settling other worlds consisting of mars. it's the main motive he founded SpaceX in 2002, the billionaire entrepreneur has stated time and again over the years — to assist humanity turn out to be a multiplanet species.

team dragon, which could preserve a maximum of seven people, isn't always built for such ambitious exploration paintings. so, SpaceX is developing a brand new spaceflight device, which includes a hundred-passenger spacecraft called starship and a large rocket dubbed terrific heavy, each of that allows you to be reusable.

SpaceX has already constructed a small-scale "hopper" prototype of a starship, which musk has stated would possibly begin making brief test flights within earth's surroundings in the coming weeks. if all goes in accordance to plan, starship and splendid heavy will launch a Jap billionaire and numerous other passengers on a round-the-moon assignment in 2023, and possibly send the primary human beings closer to mars some years later.

musk envisions starship and notable heavy, in the end, sporting all of SpaceX's load, doing the entirety from launching satellites and crewed pink planet missions to cleaning up space junk and ferrying people on "point-to-point" journeys around the earth.

so get an eyeful of crew Dragon, its cargo-sporting cousin and SpaceX's Falcon 9 and falcon heavy rockets even as you can — their days are likely numbered.