Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire Japanese fashion CEO who paid a lot of money to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the first seats on his Starship spacecraft for a trip around the moon in 2023, recently teased a big announcement regarding the trip. Mystery Solved: Maezawa announced on Tuesday that he has one shot to join his crew
The mission, known as dearMoon, includes 10-12 crewmembers, with eight slots available to the general public to request through the missions websiteMaezawa seems to be aiming for a fast timeline: the pre-registration is scheduled for March 14, 2021, with the first screenings on March 21. The website claims that the more successful applicants will receive final interviews and medical checkups in late May 2021. The focus will be on mission training between that time and the launch date.
The only two qualifications required of applicants is that they “do their utmost” to improve society and that they will support other crew members who are doing the same. The remaining crew members will hopefully consist of individuals qualified in some scientific or engineering discipline related to piloting a spacecraft.
The dearMoon mission is meant to be a dramatic testament to the usefulness of Starship, the spacecraft Musk says it will eventually carry SpaceX-backed settlers and up to 100 tons of cargo per trip to the planet Mars, acting as a sort of demo for the future of commercial space flight. The intention is to take an approximately six-day journey around the moon which Musk says is the farthest a human has traveled from planet Earth.
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Those who are not selected will in any case receive a consolation prize in the form of a promotional image with their face on it.
“What I am most looking forward to is seeing my home planet, the great blue Earth, with my own eyes,” Maezawa said in a promotional video released Tuesday. And after we come out of the dark side of the moon, we may be able to see the ‘rising of the earth’. Like the sunrise, the round shape of the earth will appear from behind the moon’s horizon. “
“How will we feel when we experience something so phenomenal?” Maezawa added, saying that his main motivation for boarding was to satisfy his curiosity, remind himself how precious the Earth is, and “to be reminded of how small, how insignificant I am. In space, I think I realize how small I am, how much more I need to experience, how much harder I should work, and how much more I should grow. “
Maezawa is one well-known publicity dog whose lunar ambitions seem to coincide clothing marketing requirements, and he had previously announced (and unfortunately left later) a contest on reality TV to find a girlfriend willing to fly to space with him. Like TechCrunch notedMaezawa’s original plan was to bring in eight artists before he got a revelation that anyone who is creative is some sort of artist. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the crew schedule plans may change again even if the vessel leaves the ground in 2023 as Musk currently says he does
There hasn’t been much news about the dearMoon project since it began in 2018, although SpaceX is steadily working on Starship. SpaceX’s SN9 rocket, a prototype for the spacecraft, experienced what the company called “quick unplanned disassemblyDuring a high-altitude launch test last month, a euphemism for engine problems during the landing that led to the craft destroying itself. Another SpaceX prototype, SN8, suffered a similar fate during a test in December 2020. Also some previous test models exploded, burst or collapsed by itself for that. The Federal Aviation Administration started an investigation in the February 2021 incident amid reports that SpaceX had violated safety precautions during previous tests, although later issued an all-clear for the company to launch an SN10 prototype the next few days.