Japanese billionaire businessman Yusaku Maezawa speaks at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Michael Sheetz | CNBC
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced on Tuesday that he will choose eight members of the public to join him on his journey around the moon, scheduled to fly on the SpaceX Starship rocket in 2023.
“I am inviting you to join me on this mission,” said Maezawa in a video.
Maezawa, who announced the mission in September 2018 alongside SpaceX founder Elon Musk, said the plan evolved from flying artists on a trip to lunar orbit.
His project, called dearMoon, will now fly from “10 to 12 people in all”, with eight crew members coming from members of the public that Maezawa plans to choose.
The billionaire says he “will pay for the entire trip”, so that those who join him fly for free. Maezawa made a fortune after founding fashion retailer Zozotown, which he resigned in 2019 after selling a majority stake to SoftBank.
The dearMoon mission will take three days to fly to the moon, loop behind it in orbit and then spend three days returning. Musk added that, in addition to the first record as a private lunar mission, the rocket’s flight path means that it will go beyond the distance traveled by the Apollo missions.
“This mission, we hope that people will go further than any human being has ever been to planet Earth,” said Musk.
The flight plan of the mission.
DearMoon
The dearMoon website says that “pre-registration” is open until March 14. The pre-registration application asks for your name, country, email address and a profile photo. An “initial screening” process begins on March 21, with a “final interview and medical examination” in late May.
There are two “key criteria” for anyone who signs up to fly with Maezawa: First, that a potential passenger can advance “any activity” they are “going into space”.
“Going into space, could you do something even better, even bigger?” Maezawa asked.
Second, the eight aspiring astronauts must “be willing and able to support other crew members who share similar aspirations,” he said.
The SN9 starship prototype is launched from the company’s development facilities in Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX
It has been almost two and a half years since Maezawa made his original dearMoon announcement and the project maintained its 2023 target for the launch of the mission.
In the meantime, SpaceX continued to work on the development of the Starship. The rocket represents a state-of-the-art vehicle that is the key to Musk’s dreams of space exploration.
Musk wants the Starship to be completely reusable – not just the booster, which is the bottom of the rocket – landing and relaunching in a way more similar to a commercial airplane.
SpaceX has not yet reached orbit with a Starship rocket, but is building and testing prototypes quickly at its facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. The company has successfully launched several starship prototypes, landing them safely after short flights at about 500 feet above sea level.
Its two most recent high-altitude flights, despite passing through several development milestones, exploded with impact during landing attempts.
SpaceX has not revealed how much it has spent on the Starship program so far, but Musk previously estimated that its completion will cost the company about $ 5 billion.
Notably, SpaceX’s valuation has skyrocketed since Maezawa’s original announcement, from about $ 25 billion at the time to about $ 74 billion last month.
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