Do you want to run away? A Japanese billionaire is looking for eight volunteers to fly to the moon with him on Elon Musk’s spaceship.
“It will take three days to reach the moon, its background and three days to return,” Yusaku Maezawa said in a video Tuesday. “I’ll pay for the whole trip.”
Applications will be submitted before March 14, and initial screenings will begin shortly thereafter. Final interviews and medical examinations are scheduled to compete in late May.
The mission to fly around the moon and back (called dearMoon) is scheduled for 2023 on a SpaceX spacecraft. Although 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 test flights of the star spacecraft ended in explosive landings.
Maezawa, entrepreneur and art collector who founded the online fashion business Zozo 3092,
– which 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 10-12 people in total, 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 to the trip, but that plan has “evolved,” he said, as he decided “artist” was too ambiguous a term.
“Everyone 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 into space with him: a willingness to push the envelope to create a better society and a willingness to support others, including crew members, in their aspirations.
“These two criteria will be key to selecting the eight crew members,” he said.
In the video, Musk noted 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 people to go beyond what any human on planet Earth has ever gone.”
It is unclear how much the lunar mission to Maezawa costs. In 2018, Musk just said it’s about “a lot of money”. But Maezawa is no stranger to mischief: he spent a record $ 110.5 million on a Basquiat painting at a 2017 auction and admitted to losing $ 41 million in daily trading in 2020.