Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire CEO of Japanese fashion who paid a lot of money to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the first seats on his spacecraft for a trip around the Moon in 2023, recently triggered a big announcement in relation to the trip. Mystery solved: Maezawa proclaimed on Tuesday that he is offering all interested parties a shot to join your crew.
The mission, known as dearMoon, will involve 10-12 crew membersembers, with eight places available for the general public to register through the mission website. Maezawa seems to be looking for a quick schedule: pre-registration is scheduled for March 14, 2021, with initial screenings being conducted until March 21. The website states that the most successful candidates will receive final interviews and medical examinations by the end of May 2021. Between then and the launch date, the focus will be on training for the mission.
The only two qualifications required of applicants are that they “push the envelope” to improve society and support other crew members who do the same. The remaining crew members are expected to consist of individuals qualified in some type of scientific or engineering discipline related to the operation of a spacecraft.
The dearMoon mission is intended to be dramatic proof of the Starship’s usefulness, the Musk spacecraft says it will eventually transport SpaceX-supported settlers and up to 100 tons of cargo per trip to the planet Mars, and act as a kind of demonstration for the future of flight. commercial space. It is planned to consist of a trip of about six days around the moon that Musk says will be the farthest that a human being has ever traveled from planet Earth.
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Those not selected will receive, at least, a consolation prize in the form of a promotional image with the face printed.
“What I most hope for is to see my home planet, the great blue Earth with my own eyes,” said Maezawa in a promotional video released Tuesday. “And then, after leaving the dark side of the Moon, we may be able to see ‘Earth’. Like sunrise, the round shape of the Earth will appear beyond the horizon of the Moon. ”
“How will we feel when we experience something so phenomenal?” Maezawa added, saying that his main motivations for taking the flight included satisfying his curiosity, reminding himself how precious the Earth is, and “being reminded of how small, how insignificant I am. In space, I think I will realize how small I am, the more I have to experiment, the more I must work and the more I must grow. “
Maezawa is a well-known advertising hunter whose lunar ambitions seem to coincide with imperatives of clothing marketing, and he had previously announced (and sadly after abandoned) a reality show competition to find a girlfriend willing to fly into space with him. How Annotated TechCrunch, Maezawa’s original plan was to bring eight artists before he had an epiphany that all creatives are a kind of artist. Therefore, it is reasonable to suspect that plans for the crew list may change again, even assuming that the ship leaves the ground in 2023, as Musk currently says he will.
Not much news has emerged about the dearMoon project since its inception in 2018, although SpaceX has been constantly working on Starship. SpaceX’s SN9 rocket, a prototype of the spacecraft, experienced what the company called “unscheduled quick disassembly”During a high altitude launch test last month, a euphemism for engine problems during landing that caused the aircraft to obliterate. Another SpaceX prototype, SN8, suffered a similar fate during a test in December 2020. Several previous test models also exploded, burst, or collapsed about themselves before that. The Federal Aviation Administration launched an investigation in the February 2021 incident amid reports that SpaceX had violated safety regulations during previous tests, although later issued an all-clear for the company to launch an SN10 prototype in the next days.