Do you want to escape? A Japanese billionaire is looking for eight volunteers to fly with him on Elon Musk’s spaceship each month.
“It will take three days to reach the moon, to get behind it and three days to get back,” Yusaku Maezawa said in a video on Tuesday. “I will pay for the whole trip.”
Applications are scheduled for March 14, and initial screenings will begin shortly. Final interviews and medical check-ups are scheduled to take place by the end of May.
The mission to fly around the moon and back – nicknamed dearMoon – is scheduled for 2023 on a SpaceX spacecraft. Although the spacecraft is still in its early stages of testing, Musk says he is confident it will be ready in two years. The first two Starship test flights ended with explosive landings.
Maezawa, an entrepreneur and art collector who founded the online fashion business Zozo 3092,
– which he sold to SoftBank 9984,
for $ 900 million in 2019 – bought the right to be SpaceX’s first monthly tourist in 2018.
The flight will have a total of 10-12 people, including the eight civilians. “I hope we can have a fun trip together,” Maezawa said.
Maezawa’s initial plan two years ago was to invite artists on a journey, but that plan “evolved,” he said, as he decided the “artist” was too ambiguous a term.
“Every person who does something creative could be called an artist … and that’s why I wanted to reach a wider and more diverse audience.”
Maezawa said there are two key criteria for those who want to fly in space with him: the desire to push the envelope to create a better society and the desire to support others, including crew members, in their aspirations.
“These two criteria will be essential in selecting 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, the moon will pass, Musk said, so “we expect humans to go further than any human has ever left Earth.”
It is unclear how much the moon’s mission on Maezawa costs. In 2018, Musk just said it’s “a lot of money.” But Maezawa is no stranger to breaking – he spent a record $ 110.5 million on a Basquiat painting in a 2017 auction and acknowledged that he lost $ 41 million in daily trading in 2020.