Do you want to get away? A Japanese billionaire is looking for eight volunteers to fly to the moon with him on Elon Musk’s spaceship.
“It takes three days to get to the moon, find out, and three days to get back,” Yusaku Maezawa said in a video Tuesday. “I’ll pay for the whole trip.”
Applications are scheduled for March 14, with the first screenings starting shortly after. Final interviews and medical checks will take place at the end of May.
The mission to fly around the moon and back – dubbed dearMoon – is scheduled for 2023 on a SpaceX Starship. While the spacecraft is still in the early stages of testing, Musk says he is confident it will be ready in two years. The first two Starship test flights ended in explosive crash landings.
Maezawa, an entrepreneur and art collector who founded the online fashion company Zozo 3092,
– which he sold to SoftBank 9984,
for $ 900 million in 2019 – bought the right to be SpaceX’s first lunar 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,” said Maezawa.
Maezawa’s original plan two years ago was to invite artists to the trip, but that plan has since “evolved,” he said, as he decided “artist” was too ambiguous a term.
“Any person who does something creative could be called an artist … and that’s why I wanted to reach a wider, more diverse audience.”
Maezawa said there are two main criteria for those who want to fly to space with him: the willingness to push the limits to create a better society, and the willingness to support others, including crew members, in their ambitions. .
“Those two criteria will be key 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 outside Earth’s orbit. It will actually go beyond the moon, Musk said, so “we expect humans to go further than any human has ever left planet Earth.”
It is unclear how much the Moon mission will cost Maezawa. In 2018, Musk only said it’s “a lot of money.” But Maezawa is no stranger to excesses – he spent a record $ 110.5 million for a Basquiat painting at auction in 2017, admitting he lost $ 41 million in day trading by 2020.