If a snake oil salesman like Elon Musk says the sun is shining at noon on a clear day, it is best to look up and check before accepting it as fact.

I do not “fear” the loss of life of someone dumb enough to ride on this monstrosity. My concern is that carnival freak shows like this make a sustained and permanent lunar return less likely because brainless media and SpaceX fanboy enthusiasm for this pronouncement can fool the unsuspecting public into thinking that “we ARE going to the Moon.”

You are pretending there is any chance they are not using sub-cooled propellants?

Excellent point, Joe! And with the Falcon Heavy, THREE 1st-stage vehicles will all be making vertical landings back on terra firma. How much extra fuel must be carried to return each of those stages? And how do the economics work in terms of the trade-off between fuel and payload? As an old airliner salesman (I used to work for Fokker Aircraft), I have yet to see any good answers to these questions.

The best way to look at this is to think about the AV-8B Harrier II V/STOL or the F-35B STOVL aircraft. Or any other vertical lift aircraft that has ever flown. The fuel burn that is required to ride on a vertical column of thrust is tremendous. The original GR.1 and AV-8A Harriers had very little range or payload if they took off vertically because so much fuel was burned just getting off the geound. That is why the Royal Navy employed short take-off runs and adopted ski jump decks for their Sea Harriers. And that is why the RAF and the USMC usually employed short take-off runs (where the wings provided some lift) for normal operations. The F-35B uses a forward lift fan connected by a shaft to the aircraft’s engine. That fan takes up space and adds weight, reducing range and/or payload. Which is why the F-35B is a STOVL aircraft (not V/STOL).

From an economics point of view, military operators aren’t all that worried about fuel burn with the Harrier and F-35B. Their bottomline is hitting a target, not making money. But commercial operators have different requirements, which is why Hawker Siddeley’s HS.141 was never built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_HS.141

I remember this proposal at the time. The aircraft was designed to fly in and out of city centre landing pads much like the heliports employed by New York Airways atop the Pan Am Building back in the ’60s. Except they would have served short, intercity routes. Apart from making too much noise with its multiple lift engines, the HS.141 would have made too little (if any) money because of the range/payload penalties that resulted from vertical take offs and landings. The project was abandoned in favor of the more conventional HS.146, which was produced as the BAe 146.

I have yet to see SpaceX demonstrate the cost effectiveness of Falcon’s vertical landings. I’ll grant you that it’s quite an achievement. But is it really the great economic achievement that they claim it is?

” questions … remain unanswered. ” <– No, no known questions remain unanswered. Unknowns are why the risk cannot be made zero. It's SpaceX's and the customer's call.

" we’ve yet to see even a structural test article of the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. " <– Emphatically not the case. There are pictures of FH exclusive hardware available on the web. Google, " Falcon Heavy interstage ".

" The N-1 Soviet rocket had 30 engines in its first stage; it launched four times and exploded each time. " <– Which is known to have nothing to do with the number of engines, but with poor Soviet software and hardware quality control–which was absent from the Soviet effort.

" Additionally, SpaceX’s booster landing and recovery system is built into each segment of the FH first stage, complicating operations and reducing its total payload capacity. " <– Not true, when a booster is not to be recovered, they leave out heavy chunks of recovery related hardware. Also not true that there is any "complication" to recovering a booster which necessarily makes the ascent problematic, and also not true it is not worth it for a booster to be recovered in a largely refuel/refly condition. You can say that's a judgement call, and you can say I have no good judgement–but nothing worthwhile towards off Earth settlement will take place at inflation constant dollars of many thousands of dollars a pound. The cost must fall dramatically, only SpaceX has an operational plan which is operating, which can make that happen.

" A LEO-configured Dragon 2 … the week-long journey. " <– Actually not clear at all that reducing crew from 7 to 2 doesn't largely take care of that.

" Still, a few … of Falcon Heavy. " Almost a distinction without a difference, Buran flew once as a stunt.

" For Falcon Heavy, this figure is 54 tones, a bit less than one-half the quantity of the Saturn V (120 tones). " <– Almost meaningless, considering the FH can fly the amount into orbit the Sat V could for about 1/4 the total price.

" The Dragon 2 has never flown in space, let alone transported people there. " <– A non-sequitor. What concrete reasons do you have to doubt it will? Name one unsolvable problem.

" a large coronal mass ejection during translunar flight would mean instant death for the crew. " <– No more true now than for Apollo 8.

" but it is unclear that the SpaceX flight teams have the knowledge and experience to conduct such a flight. " <– It is not clear this is problematic, especially since hardware has become far more reliable and lighter for like function since Apollo. It is not clear keying a mic is more challenging when the receiver is farther away.

" A Dragon 2 on … must function perfectly. " <– The perfection required of its function is not much greater than that needed for it's intended operational use.

" Perhaps the greatest … human would have. " <– It is 100% certain the Dragon capsule's heat shield will be fine with re-entry, neither have there been any hints of problems with it's maneuvering jets, or with the computer that run them.

" Given all these … of cislunar space. " <– Anything might go wrong with both efforts. You are drastically exaggerating the unknown and known risks for SpaceX and not acknowledging them on the part of the Chinese.

According to at least one of the members of the Augustine Commission that is factually incorrect. The Commission members were told that a lunar program was a non starter with the Obama Administration – not because it was “too expensive” – but because it was Bush’s plan.

“Musk has been steadily progressing space-flight as per his vision of making space more affordable by making his rockets re-usable. He has done more than anyone else ever, so there is that.”

Making a blanket statement like ” He has done more than anyone else ever” is never a good idea. More than Von Braun et. al., really. It makes you sound like a Musk groupie.

Given that SpaceX own pronouncements (made separately of course) have acknowledged that (if they succeed in) reusing the Falcon 9 will reduce payload by 30% while reducing cost by 10%. That does not sound like “making space more affordable”.

“And, although Paul Spudis points to China as making steady, definable achievements in “cis-lunar space”, I think SpaceX is also doing that, in steady, definable achievements, that will benefit all of us.”

Beyond developing a possibly reusable Falcon 9 first stage (that will by SpaceX own pronouncements – reduce payload by 30% while reducing cost only 10%),please list SpaceX’s “steady, definable achievements, that will benefit all of us”

There is nothing proprietary about explaining (at the system schematic level) whether you use a blow down or redundant fan system to handle fan failure fault tolerance (as Boeing has done for their commercial crew design).

Musk’s paranoia about the US patent system not withstanding, there is simply nothing to steal.

If you can not (or will not) understand that there is nothing more to usefully discuss.

At the beginning of the Obama administration, funding for the Constellation program was approximately $3.4 a year which is pretty close to current levels of SLS/Orion funding.

Additional funding for the Constellation program was supposed to come from the termination of the $3 billion a year Space Shuttle program and the $2 billion a year ISS program. $8.4 billion a year would have been plenty of money for NASA to return to the Moon before the end of the decade even with an architecture as bad as the Ares I/Ares V.

But there were plenty of cheaper alternatives for a lunar return.

But President Obama simply thought it was a waste of tax payer money to return to the Moon. And he was wrong!

It’s good to be skeptical. However, that’s not the only possible explanation. It could be, as Musk said years ago, SpaceX doesn’t publish and does not patent their designs because the Chinese would steal them.

It’s a balance between keeping trade secrets, and publishing/patenting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/an-exclusive-look-at-jeff-bezos-plan-to-set-up-amazon-like-delivery-for-future-human-settlement-of-the-moon/?postshare=8431488495576862&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.ce85df1c3685

Here are some samples from the article:

– The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump’s transition team about the company’s interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy.

– Blue Origin’s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn’t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon — unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left “flags and footprints” and then came home.

– Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”

– The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the “water ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater’s deep crevices.”

No way at this point to evaluated the practicality of the specific proposal, but it sure sounds like somebody read “The Value of the Moon.”