Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa invited the public on Tuesday to apply for a spot on the SpaceX Starship on his private mission around the Moon, reaching a “broader and more diverse audience” two years after announcing that he would only travel with a select group of artists. The trip is scheduled for 2023, but that date may not be maintained.
“I want people from all backgrounds to participate,” said Maezawa in a video posted on Tuesday afternoon, when the contest application went live. “There will be 10 to 12 people in all, but I will be inviting 8 people to come with me on the tour.”
Maezawa, the founder of Japan’s largest online fashion retailer, is worth about $ 2 billion. He was revealed as the first passenger hired by Starship in 2018 during an event with CEO Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters in California. At the event, Maezawa, an avid art collector, announced his Dear Moon Project, which aimed to bring “six to eight artists from around the world” to join him on a six-day lunar flyby mission in 2023 .
“These artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth, and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within us all,” said Maezawa at the time.
In a YouTube video posted on Tuesday, Maezawa said the plan “has evolved since then”, adding that “maybe every person doing something creative can be called an artist.”
Now, anyone who meets two criteria can be chosen for the tour: those who “can push the bar to help other people and the larger society in some way” and are “willing to support other crew members who share similar aspirations. “
Updates on the project have been sparse for the past two years. In January 2020, Maezawa launched a bizarre campaign to find a “partner” to accompany him on his trip around the moon. A website for the contest received 27,722 entries, and the Japanese streaming service AbemaTV was created to document the mission in a reality show called “Full Moon Lovers”. Weeks later, the show was canceled and Maezawa canceled his search for “personal reasons”, he tweeted, apologizing to the AbemaTV team and all candidates.
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation fully reusable Mars rocket system, designed to transport humans and up to 100 tons of cargo in future deep space missions. The company has been rapidly testing the first iterations of the rocket in Boca Chica, Texas. Two recent high-altitude flight tests were launched and flew successfully, but both ended in explosions of fire on landing attempts. Under a strict and sometimes bumpy development schedule, Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said that Starship’s first orbital flight could take place in late 2021.
The other vehicle of the SpaceX crew, Crew Dragon, is already in its operational phase and is accumulating future flights with private astronauts and tourists. The acorn-shaped capsule took its first two astronaut crews to the International Space Station last year under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The planned private astronaut missions include a flight to the space station planned for the beginning of next year, taking real estate investors and philanthropists, and a “fully civil” charity mission announced last month with launch scheduled for the end of the year.
Under development…