Japanese billionaire entrepreneur 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 trip around the month, scheduled to fly on the SpaceX’s Starship rocket in 2023.
“I invite you to join me in this mission,” Maezawa said in a video.
Maezawa, who announced the mission in September 2018 with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, said the plan evolved from flying artists on a lunar orbit trip.
His project, called dearMoon, will now fly “between 10 and 12 people in total”, with eight crew members from members of the public that Maezawa intends to choose.
The billionaire says that “he will pay for the whole trip”, so those who join him will fly for free. Maezawa made a fortune after founding this retail company Zozotown, from which he resigned in 2019, after selling a majority stake to SoftBank.
DearMoon’s mission will take three days to fly to the moon, orbit behind it in orbit, and then spend three days returning. Musk added that, in addition to the first history as a private monthly mission, the missile’s flight path means that it will exceed the distance traveled by Apollo missions.
“This mission that we expect people to carry on is more than any human on Earth has ever left,” Musk said.
Mission flight plan.
dear Luna
The dearMoon website says that “pre-registration” is open until March 14. The pre-registration application requires your name, country, email address and a profile picture. An “initial screening” process begins on March 21, with a “final interview and medical check-up” at the end of May.
There are two “key criteria” for anyone requesting to fly with Maezawa: First, that a potential passenger can advance “any activity” is “going into space.”
“Going into space could you do something that’s 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 Starship SN9 prototype is being launched from the company’s development unit in Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX
It’s been almost two and a half years since Maezawa made his original DearMoon announcement, and the project has stuck to its 2023 mission launch goal.
Meanwhile, SpaceX continued to work on the development of Starship. The rocket is a next-generation vehicle, which is the key to Musk’s dreams of space exploration.
Musk aims to make Starship completely reusable – not just a booster, which is the bottom of the rocket – by landing and relaunching in a way more like a commercial plane.
SpaceX has not yet reached orbit with a Starship rocket, but is rapidly building and testing prototypes at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The company successfully launched several Starship prototypes, landing them safely after short flights at about 500 feet in altitude.
Its last two high-altitude flights, despite passing several development milestones, exploded on impact during landing attempts.
SpaceX has not disclosed how much it has spent on the Starship program so far, but Musk previously estimated that it expects the company to cost about $ 5 billion to complete.
In particular, SpaceX’s valuation has risen from Maezawa’s original announcement, from about $ 25 billion at the time to about $ 74 billion in the last month.
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