Do you want to escape? A Japanese billionaire is looking for eight volunteers to fly to the moon with him on Elon Musk’s ship.
“It will take three days to get to the moon, make a loop behind it, and three days to get back,” said Yusaku Maezawa in a video on Tuesday. “I will pay for the entire trip.”
Entries must be made by March 14, with the first exhibitions starting soon after. Final interviews and medical examinations are scheduled to take place in late May.
The mission to fly around the moon and return – nicknamed dearMoon – is scheduled for 2023 on a SpaceX spacecraft. Although the spacecraft is still in the early stages of testing, Musk says he is confident it will be ready in two years. The spacecraft’s first two test flights ended in explosive landings.
Maezawa, entrepreneur and art collector who founded the Zozo 3092 online fashion business,
– which he sold to SoftBank 9984,
for $ 900 million in 2019 – bought the right to be SpaceX’s first lunar tourist in 2018.
The flight will have 10 to 12 people in total, including eight civilians. “I hope that together we can have a fun trip,” said Maezawa.
Maezawa’s initial plan two years ago was to invite artists on the trip, but that plan has since “evolved”, he said, in deciding that “artist” was a very ambiguous term.
“Every person who is doing something creative can be called an artist … which is why I wanted to reach a wider and more diverse audience.”
Maezawa said there are two main criteria for those who want to fly into space with him: the willingness to go further to create a better society and the willingness to support other people, including crew members, in their aspirations.
“These two criteria will be fundamental in the selection of the eight crew members,” he said.
In the video, Musk pointed out that the mission will be the first commercial space flight with humans to travel beyond Earth’s orbit. In fact, it will pass the moon, said Musk, so “we hope that people will go further than any human being has ever been to planet Earth.”
It is unclear how much the lunar mission is costing Maezawa. In 2018, Musk just said that it is “a lot of money”. But Maezawa is no stranger to ostentation – he spent a record $ 110.5 million for a painting by Basquiat at a 2017 auction and admitted to having lost $ 41 million in day trading in 2020.