SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon
wsj.comWhat? That has been know for a long time? How is that news?
This has been changed because of the change in the contract with NASA. NASA no longer wanted to have propulsive landing and SpaceX prefer to focus on the BFR. This made space tourism less valuable and also lead to the choice not to human rate the Falcon Heavy. The same reason that Red Dragon was cancelled.
SpaceX simply shifted all its focus on the BFR. That's their long term goal and other things are a distraction.
Or to put it another way: Holy shit, it's just a year away!
This "Grey Dragon" mission was canceled Feb 5, 2018: http://spacenews.com/spacex-no-longer-planning-crewed-missio...
Is this even a surprise? C'mon, everyone knows Musk has unrealistic deadlines. He gets shit done, it just takes longer than expected. This isn't even news anymore
> it just takes longer than expected
I don't even know if anyone expects it to take the time Elon says, except Elon.
I'm not even sure Elon expects to get things done by the deadlines he states.
He calls some deadlines "aspirational", and it appears that he uses them as a motivational tool.
Every aerospace project comes in late anyway. The key thing is that SpaceX appears to be great at hitting their development budgets.
2019 EST (Elon Standard Time)
This is just another hit piece against Elon and his companies, this isn't news.
To add more detail this was known since February when they said they weren't going to crew rate falcon heavy unless bfs/bfr was going to be significantly delayed.