In a bold and surprising step, Elon Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX wants to fly people around the moon and bring them back to Earth in 2018.
According to Musk, two private citizens -- whose identities aren't public yet -- want to pay SpaceX to send them from Earth, around the moon and bring them back home aboard a crewed Dragon spacecraft and Falcon Heavy rocket.
"We've been approached to do a crewed mission beyond the moon," Musk said during a press call Monday.
The flight profile would bring the space travelers down to "skim the surface of the moon" in a long loop around the lunar body, Musk said.
The entire mission would take about a week.
"They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission," SpaceX said in a news release.
The mission relies on two pieces of machinery that haven't yet flown their proper maiden flights.
The crewed version of Dragon hasn't flown people to space. Currently, the uncrewed version transports supplies to the International Space Station. The Falcon Heavy rocket hasn't even performed a test flight, but both of these steps should be completed before the lunar mission.
Falcon Heavy should fly for the first time before the end of this year, and the crewed Dragon spacecraft will make an uncrewed mission to the International Space Station before the end of the year, with a crewed mission to follow about six months later.
The lunar mission is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Needless to say, planning a full-on crewed moon circumnavigation on this timetable is ambitious to say the least.
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Musk also made it clear that if NASA wants to send their own astronauts on this type of flight first, then SpaceX will honor that, pushing the private mission in favor of giving the space agency first priority.
This also shouldn't be the only moonshot for SpaceX. Musk expects that eventually the company should be able to launch one or two of these kinds of flights per year.
If this first lunar flight does fly on time, it will happen 50 years after the Apollo 8 mission that brought NASA astronauts around the moon ahead of the Apollo 11 landing in 1969.
The mission will also have another historical tie in that the Falcon Heavy will launch from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A, which was the starting point for many of NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.
Now, if SpaceX gets its way, the pad will get a new life as the start of many more.
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