James Dean

FLORIDA TODAY

It's late 2018 and a large rocket stands on a Kennedy Space Center pad ready to launch humans around the moon, nearly 50 years after NASA first accomplished that feat.

But this time, the rocket belongs not to NASA but to SpaceX, and the astronauts are not elite government test pilots but private citizens buying the ride.

The scenario SpaceX outlined last week has created a buzz about a public versus private race to send people back to the moon, with the private sector now appearing to be in the lead.

NASA’s more powerful and expensive Space Launch System rocket isn’t expected to launch astronauts on a similar loop around the moon before 2019 — a schedule whose feasibility is now being studied — and possibly not until 2023.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, however, has invited the space agency to bump the private passengers and fly aboard the company’s first deep space mission. Should NASA accept the offer?

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“My answer is unequivocally yes. Either NASA gets out and gets involved with this, or the message that will be received by the American people is that NASA is irrelevant,” said Charles Miller, president of NexGen Space and a commercial space advocate who served on the Trump administration’s NASA transition team. “SpaceX is going to the moon with or without NASA, so NASA needs to say 'yes' to this offer.”

Opinions vary on the significance of SpaceX’s announcement and the extent to which it could increase pressure on a NASA exploration program taking its time to produce an exciting mission.

Advisers to President Trump’s campaign praised public-private partnerships and indicated a willingness to review whether NASA’s giant SLS rocket is needed, or if more affordable commercial alternatives are available.

But the administration has yet to nominate a NASA administrator or show that the space program is a priority, while it is proposing significant cuts to non-defense spending.

Congress, meanwhile, has maintained strong support for the SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule as foundations for eventual missions to Mars.

After Musk announced his private lunar mission on Monday, to be flown with a Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon spacecraft, NASA said in a statement that it “commends its industry partners for reaching higher.”

Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said the agency needs to leverage both traditional and commercial approaches, not be forced to choose one or the other.

“We must work with everyone to secure our leadership in space — and we will,” he wrote in a memo to employees last month about NASA’s decision to study putting a crew on the first SLS launch.

Some commercial space advocates echo that sentiment, calling SpaceX’s lunar mission a leap forward for the industry, but not one that necessarily threatens a different NASA mission.

NASA first flew three people around the moon on Apollo 8 nearly a half-century ago, after all, and its next lunar flyby is intended as a baby step testing systems for human and robotic missions farther out in the solar system.

“I don’t think NASA has anything to be worried about if somebody else can do it 50 years later,” said Alan Stern, a former head of NASA science missions. “NASA has much bigger plans and ambitions to explore other worlds with humans than just a figure 8 mission around the moon.”

SpaceX’s proposed mission is exciting in and of itself, said Stern, who chairs the Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s board of directors but was not speaking on its behalf during an interview sharing his personal views.

“It’s a phenomenal development that in the space of 50 years, more or less one career, we can go from super-power nation states mounting human lunar expeditions to individual corporations capable of doing it,” he said.

Andrew Aldrin, director of the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, also sees Musk’s moon mission as important progress for the industry.

But any government transfer of deep space missions to commercial systems, he said, should be a longer-term process based on more deliberation and results.

“If they fly, if it’s successful, if everything about it works out well, then I think the natural progression would be toward a discussion of whether it’s appropriate to transition lunar crew transportation over to the commercial sector, just as we are transitioning low Earth orbit transportation over to the commercial sector,” said Aldrin. “We need to make a transition to more commercial participation, but let’s just make it sensibly.”

Speculation about SpaceX rendering NASA’s program obsolete assumes the company’s lunar mission flies sometime close to when Musk said it will, and that it is successful.

The company is now rebounding from a second Falcon 9 failure in just over a year, and has not yet flown the Falcon Heavy, which is expected to debut this summer — four years after SpaceX initially promised.

The Dragon that is supposed to fly wealthy tourists around the moon will not fly astronauts to the International Space Station until at least next spring, mere months before the planned deep space mission.

Paul Spudis, a lunar scientist who supports a human return to the moon, has been critical both of over-hyped “New Space” achievements by the likes of SpaceX, and of NASA’s vague plans to reach Mars in the 2030s.

“Although accustomed to hearing periodic, grand pronouncements by various New Space companies, skepticism continues to grow over their follow-through, as actual accomplishment is sporadic and less certain,” Spudis wrote in his Spudis Lunar Resources Blog. “I suggest that as with many other New Space public relations extravaganzas, this ‘mission’ should be taken with a very large grain of salt.”

Miller, on the other hand, believes bolder partnerships with SpaceX, Blue Origin and other entrepreneurial firms is a strategy far more likely to produce a permanent human presence on the moon sooner rather than later.

“This is an obvious way for America to be great again in space,” he said. “There are some huge opportunities for NASA here, but it requires NASA to think differently about how it does space.”

NASA has been planning to launch a first SLS test flight without a crew by late 2018. The agency will consider adding a crew on that mission if that does not delay the flight much beyond 2019.

Assuming a relatively small slip of SpaceX’s moon mission into mid-2019, an optimistic outlook would still put its liftoff close to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, launched from the same KSC pad.

Whatever the flight’s longer-term implications might be, Aldrin, whose father was the world’s second moonwalker, said that timing “would be mind-bendingly cool.”

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean.