henrybauer wrote:This will not be one Falcon 9 booster, it will be three Falcon 9's strapped together plus and upgraded second stage or even a third stage as a Falcon Heavy which is supposed to fly sometime late this year. The Dragon 2 capsule has not flown yet, or been man-rated on a Falcon 9. I would say that they, Spacex, are really pushing the Envelope.
It will be a Falcon Heavy. Two F9 first stages as side mounted boosters and another full F9 in the middle. Standard F9 second stage with a single M-Vac engine. SpaceX, nominally, will have 3-5 flights of Dragon 2 under their belt before this trip. Since the baseline Dragon will sit for six months in space without issue it shouldn't be too big a jump to get the Dragon 2 to handle an 8-10 day trip. I agree that's still a long way to go yet but on paper anyway it should work just fine. I doubt Elon would have made a great public announcement if most of the details, navigation, comms, recovery, hadn't already been worked out in some detail.