I have a bet with a friend that James Cameron will be one of the first private citizens to go to the moon, and that he will bring an IMAX camera to fund the trip.
> Musk’s target price is essentially a rounding error compared to the budgets of Gravity or The Martian.
Do we even know Musk's target price for a return-trip to the moon? It's very hard to extrapolate from the $10/kg figure ($1M/launch) that keeps getting quoted, as a return-trip to the moon without discarding a Starship (which will blow up the cost enormously) will involve a lot of launches. Even the HLS architecture, which leaves Starship stranded in lunar orbit and uses Orion to get the astronauts back, needs 10 launches.
Even if we're very generous and assume 20 launches at $1M/launch, that's ~20% of the budget of these movies. But that's very aspirational: for HLS, which is already ambitious, NASA paid $2.89B for development & 2 launches. If we assume 80% is development, you're still looking at $289M per trip.
Roughly, I think his plan for a Mars ticket (move there, optionally come back later) is the price of a modest home in California, say $300-500k or something. And a ticket from like London to Singapore on the E2E Starship idea would be about business class prices today, which I don't know, but let's guess $10k.
So I think using this silly method, I would personally expect the price of a moon round trip to be maybe $100k. That's just market-pricing guesses though, I do not know what the costs of such a trip would actually be. But again, Elon does like to set a price target for the public and then do the engineering and production required to meet that target, so I would be surprised to see something less than an E2E hop or more than a Mars ticket, to go to the Moon and come back.
