Elon Musk ’s Moon Mission Is Exciting, Audacious… and Iffy

Elon Musk has been known to keep only few books on the shelf behind his desk at the SpaceX factory floor in Hawthorne, Calif. Most of them are basic books on rocket design. The remaining one is Einstein, the biography of the great physicist, by former TIME editor Walter Isaacson. There’s an odd push-pull in a man like Musk, who is humble enough to own a space launch company and yet still keep his how-to-build-a-rocket-ship books on display, and ambitious enough to make it clear who his role model appears to be. It was that ambitious dimension of Musk that was on fullest display this week when he announced that late next year, SpaceX will send two astronauts around the moon, venturing further into space than human beings ever have. “Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind,” a statement on the SpaceX site said. Invoking Apollo had more resonance than it seems. If the mission flies when promised, it will occur close to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission, which was a similar swing for the fences that NASA launched in Christmas week 1968. Musk knows rockets, but he also knows marketing, and this is not likely to have escaped his notice. The question, of course, is whether he can really make good on his promise. And the answer is uncertain. Let’s stipulate that SpaceX is in many ways the wünderkind company people believe. It was the first non...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Apollo 8 Elon Musk moon onetime space SpaceX Source Type: news