Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire CEO of Japanese fashion who he paid big bucks at Elon Musk’s SpaceX for first place on the Starship spacecraft for a trip to the moon in 2023, recently teased a big announcement on the trip. Mystery solved: Maezawa proclaimed on Tuesday that he offers anyone who is interested a shot while joining his crew.
The mission, known as dearMoon, will involve 10-12 m of crewjar with eight slots available to the general public to request through mission website. Maezawa seems to be aiming for a quick timeline: pre-registration is scheduled for March 14, 2021, with initial screenings until March 21. The website claims that more successful applicants will receive final interviews and medical examinations by the end of May 2021. Between then and the launch date, they will focus on mission training.
The only two qualifications required of applicants are that they “push the envelope” to improve society and that they will support other crew members who do the same. The remaining crew members will, we hope, be composed of people qualified in a kind of scientific or engineering discipline related to the operation of a spacecraft.
DearMoon’s mission is intended to be a dramatic proof of Starship’s utility, the Musk spacecraft says it will eventually transport the SpaceX-backed settlers and up to 100 tons of cargo on a trip to Mars and act as a demonstration for future. of commercial space flights. It is planned to consist of a journey of about six days around the moon, which Musk says will be the farthest journey of any man on planet Earth.
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Those who are not selected will receive at least one consolation prize in the form of a promotional image with their face on it.
“What I look forward to is seeing my home planet, the great blue Earth,” Maezawa said in a statement. Promotional video released on Tuesday. “And then, as we emerge from the dark side of the moon, we could see ‘the rising of the earth.’ Like the 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 flying include satisfying his curiosity, remembering 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, how much I have to experiment, how much I should work and how much I should grow. ”
Maezawa is a known advertising dog whose monthly ambitions seem to coincide with imperatives of clothing marketing, and had previously announced (and sad later abandoned) a competition on reality TV to find a girlfriend willing to fly in space with him. As TechCrunch notedMaezawa’s original plan was to bring in eight artists before he had an epiphany that everyone creative is an artist of sorts. So it is reasonable to suspect that plans for the crew list could change again, even if we assume that the boat will leave the ground in 2023. Musk is currently saying it will be.
There hasn’t been much news about the dearMoon project since it started in 2018, although SpaceX is constantly working on Starship. The SN9 SpaceX rocket, a prototype for 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, which led to the boat being destroyed. Another SpaceX prototype, SN8, suffered a similar fate during a test in December 2020. Several previous test models either exploded, exploded or collapsed on them before that. Federal Aviation Administration launched an investigation in the February 2021 incident based on reports from SpaceX tangled safety regulations during previous tests, although later issued a “clear” for the launch of the company an SN10 prototype in the following days.