Mr. Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX will be sending two men into space and around the moon in 2018. Two anonymous men will spend a week inside of SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsules while traveling to the moon and back, which will be launched by their Falcon Heavy rocket. This will be the first time in forty years that humans have traveled that far into space.
These two men were left anonymous. They were not described and wished not to be named. The only thing we know about them is that they are private space travelers, which is supposedly becoming a thing. Several people are paying in order to travel into space. Just recently seven space tourists paid a hefty price of about ten million dollars to visit the international space station by flying in the Russian Soyuz rocket.
SpaceX’s mission to send these two men around the moon will be further than the international space station, which has brought this mission much criticism and speculation due to the known history of previous SpaceX launches. As one commentator said, “I find it extraordinary that these sorts of announcements are being made when SpaceX has yet to get crew from the ground to low-Earth orbit.” – Dr. Dittmar. Thats not all, just this past month in February, SpaceX delayed a launch due a common glitch which deemed the lauch unsafe to follow through with it.
Both the Dragon 2 and the Falcon Heavy are both years behind schedule. So is this mission more of a scientific plan, or can they actually execute and make history? Only time can tell, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
wutthescience 
The Planetary Society is a space advocacy group founded inpart by Carl Sagan and currently run by Bill Nye, they host a weekly radio show called The Planetary Post. During their last show they spoke briefly about this announcement and were all quite skeptical of the timeline. I believe SpaceX has the potential to achieve such a feat but I too am skeptical of their timeline. Elon Musk has great ideas and great motivation but it seems he often misses his impractical deadlines. It’s also true that SpaceX is behind schedule with its current responsibilities to launch communication satellites and the like into orbit for NASA and for private companies. I truly wish them the best and would love to see them accomplish such ambitious goals but I think we should all take their timelines with a grain of salt.
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