NASA wants to go to moon in about 4 years (!) but today they can't even lift a human into earth orbit since they discontinued their last spacecraft capable of such a task. Dream on.
That will change this spring which isn’t too far away.
> Elon Musk’s SpaceX simulated a successful emergency landing on Sunday in a dramatic test of a crucial abort system on an unmanned astronaut capsule, a big step its mission to fly NASA astronauts for the first time as soon as this spring.
Uh huh, that article is from 2017 and also says this:
> Nearly 45 years after NASA astronauts last embarked on a lunar mission, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has announced his company's plans to send two private citizens on a flight around the moon in 2018.
The decided it wasn't worth the effort to do all the additional work to man rate falcon heavy when it would probably be hardly used as they have shifted focus to their bigger starship rocket.
LEO requires totally different technology than getting to and landing on the Moon. So yes, they cannot get to LEO, but they've been developing the machines (SLS) that should allow them to get to the Moon. It's doubtful it'll happen by 2024 though.
It needs more than just the rocket. You also need a lunar lander, and all we have right now are paper sketches of designs that would take more than four years to finish and build, on conventional timelines. (One wild card is the SpaceX Starship, which Elon is talking about having some lunar capability for, on extremely aggressive timelines. But Starship is a risky project in all sorts of ways -- besides which, before trying to take Elon's timelines to the bank, you might want to look at the years of delays before they finally launched Falcon Heavy.)
> One wild card is the SpaceX Starship, which Elon is talking about having some lunar capability for,
“Some lunar capability” is an understatement. If high elliptical orbital refuelling of Starship works it will completely change the game - eliminating the need for a lander & service module.
Instead of delivering a 25-30 ton lander, they’ll land the entire second stage, with 100 tons of cargo (or dozens of passengers), all at a fraction of the cost of the estimate $1 billion SLS launch cost.
Starship is already being prototyped, and will probably fly this year or next, while NASAs crewed lunar lander proposals are all just proposals.
Most of the Falcon Heavy delays was because F9 became capable of lifting many of the payloads originally planned for Heavy, which then became (and still is) a solution in search of a problem.
very true, by the time falcon heavy launched it was more of a novelty than anything else. I'm surprised it wasn't scrapped entirely and the effort redirected to BFR.
