Space Adventures 2018 Circumlunar Mission

[Grey Havoc]

http://www.spaceadventures.com/experiences/circumlunar-mission/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/travel/47469/mankind-returns-to-the-moon.html

 

[GTX]

Well only last night my wife was saying that she wanted to plan our 2018 holiday...

 

[blackstar]

There's a remarkable lack of specifics in all that reporting. When are they testing hardware and what are they testing? And who is flying? And a million other questions.

 

[TomS]

It's apparently Soyuz-based.

It's pretty sketchy, really. The plan is to launch the crew to ISS on a Soyuz, then rendezvous-on-orbit with an extra hab module and booster that are launched seperately. No mention of where this hab module comes from (new design, ISS leftover, something else?). The Descent module also needs a totally new heat shield (and possibly a new skip reentry profile) to handle higher reentry velocities thanks to the free return trajectory. Sounds like a fun ride (not!)

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1406/15lunarsoyuz/

And apparently Roscosmos wants nothing to do with it -- it's strictly a private venture between Space Adventures and Energia. Not sure how that works given the ISS visit.

 

[blackstar]

After looking at these new articles, I cannot figure out if there is anything really new here compared to what they have been saying all along. There's a surprising lack of details. When are they going to build hardware? When are they going to test? How many test flights? Doing what? Who are the customers?

I don't think that anything has really changed, but they're doing a PR push.