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Indeed. Of course, SpaceX's tonnage delivered to the moon to date is 0, lagging the space programs mentioned above.
Wrong, Falcon 9 has delivered several lunar missions. Disregarding even missions to lunar orbit:
1,000 kgThis is enough to put SpaceX above every nation except China (barely) and the USSR, with just Falcon 9/Heavy.
I mean, it landed, but I thought we were discussing soft landings rather than impacting the surface at a high rate of speed.
Same deal.
Counting only successful landings we're at 3600 kg. Chandrayaan-3 had a launch mass of 3900 kg, so SpaceX is only exceeding Japan.
I admit I was mistaken about 0, but copy pasting AI slop in response doesn't inspire confidence.
Those landing failures had nothing to do with SpaceX. They delivered the payloads to the correct insertion velocity, so the SpaceX portion of the mission was successful.
SpaceX are the Ryanair of LEO, which is a perfectly respectable business to be in. If they don't deserve the blame for what a payload does once it goes past LEO, they don't deserve credit either.
Are you saying that Ryanair's successful trips shouldn't be included in their overall air safety record one way or the other because the passengers did something dumb after disembarking?
I'm saying that if Ryanair flies a climber to Chamonix who goes on to climb Mont Blanc, they haven't flown him to the summit of Mont Blanc, and they don't get credit for flying to the summit of Mont Blanc; and that if Ryanair flies a climber to Chamonix who goes on to die on Mont Blanc, they didn't kill him and don't get blame for killing him.
The successful flight to Chamonix counts to Ryanair's safety record of non-mountain flying in either case. Translating back to @pusher_robot's comments about SpaceX, I don't think it makes sense to say that "SpaceX has delivered x successful lunar missions" and include crashes in the total on the basis that SpaceX successfully got them as far as LEO.
TLI. (and a precise high-apogee high-efficiency TLI, not just something like the interplanetary YOLO of Falcon Heavy's first test) You're right that this isn't the same and isn't as impressive as being responsible for a soft-landing stage in a lunar mission too, but it's still a little more impressive than LEO. There are four or five launch vehicles operational today that have put payloads in LEO but no higher.
Interesting. I hadn't seen SpaceX talking about orbits higher than GTO, so I assumed that was as high as they went. If SpaceX is putting the craft in trans-lunar coast, they can definitely claim credit and blame for the lunar mission if they want, but they still don't get to cherrypick.
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