The recent success of the Crew Dragon test flight has led people, myself included, to wonder if it would make more sense to use a modified Crew Dragon spacecraft for lunar missions instead of the hideously expensive Orion spacecraft that NASA has been developing for more than a decade.
The folks at Ars Technica have been wondering the same thing and have written an article about it.
More than a month before Endeavour returned to Earth, Zubrin and another rocket scientist, Homer Hickam, co-authored a provocative op-ed in The Washington Post titled “Send the SpaceX Dragon to the Moon.”
They cited several concerns about Orion, but the principal one is mass. At 26.5 tons, Orion and its Service Module are very heavy. Because of this girth, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket cannot even get Orion all the way into low lunar orbit with enough maneuvering capability to get back to Earth.
“We recognize the hard work that NASA and its contractors have put forth on Orion/SLS, but they have simply been left behind by more nimble commercial companies,” Zubrin and Hickam wrote. “Dragon is not just cheaper than Orion; it is much better, because it is much lighter.”
Crew Dragon has a dry mass of less than 10 tons and 50 percent more internal space than the Apollo capsule that carried three astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket has the capacity to lift Crew Dragon and a “return stage” into lunar orbit. There, the vehicle would dock with a lunar lander that would carry the crew to the surface while the Crew Dragon capsule remains in low lunar orbit. After sciencing on the Moon, the astronauts would use the lander to return to the Crew Dragon, fire the return stage, and come home to Earth.
Tl; DR: It's technically possible but politically fraught.
If you have doubts about the technical issues involved in using SpaceX's technology and getting the work done by 2024, view this video.
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