Na
tiskové konferenci (5.2.2018) před prvním letem Falconu Heavy Elon Musk prohlásil, že idea obletu Měsíce s komerčními pasažéry v lodi Crew Dragon, venášené na FH byla prozatím odložena k ledu.
Důvodem tohoto rozhodnutí je podle něj rapidním tempem pokračující vývoj BFR/BFS a plán vyslat pasažéry tímto novým dopravním systémem. Pouze v případě, že by se ve vývoji vyskytly vážné komplikace, které by ho výrazně zdržely, uvažovali by opět o úsilí certifikovat Falcon Heavy pro lety s lidskou posádkou. Z dnešního pohledu se jim to ale zdá jako tříštění zdrojů a plýtvání energii, protože se plně soustředí na perspektivnější systém BFR/BFS.
Musk také prohlásil, že očekává první krátké lety BFS snad už v roce 2019.
Pokud nedojde ke změně strategie zpět k FH+CD, nemůžeme pro toto vlákno očekávat žádné nové informace.
Originální citace z tiskovky k tématu:
"What we decided internally is to focus our future efforts on BFR. Now we'll see how the BFR development goes. If that ends up taking longer than expected, then we'll return to the idea of sending a Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy around the Moon. And potentially doing other things with crew on Falcon Heavy. But right now it looks like BFR development is moving quickly and it will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed spaceflight. We could be ready to do short hops of the spaceship portion of BFR. BFR essentially consists of a giant booster and a giant spaceship. The giant spaceship is... once you're out of Earth's deep gravity well and thick atmosphere, for the rest of the solar system, you only need the ship. The giant booster is only needed for Earth, with its unusually deep gravity well and thick atmosphere. So our focus is on the ship, and we expect to hopefully do short flights on the ship, with the ship next year. You know, aspirational.
...
Falcon Heavy is absolutely capable of sending a Crew Dragon, Dragon version 2 that's under development and that we'll fly later this year for NASA. With a single stick Falcon 9, it's easy for us to do Low Earth Orbit missions, or Medium Earth Orbit missions, and then as soon as you add Falcon Heavy on, we can toss Dragon way past the moon. It's actually further than we went with Apollo. Possibly even visit an asteroid or something like that. That was our plan until last year. Then we though, you know, maybe we can make this BFR development go faster than we thought, and if that's true, there won't be much point in qualifying Falcon Heavy for launching Dragon, making it fully man-rated. So we kind of tabled the crewed Dragon on Falcon Heavy in favor of focusing our energies on BFR...."