Do you want to get away? A Japanese billionaire is looking for eight volunteers to fly with him on the spaceship Elon Musk to the moon.
“It will take three days to get to the moon, walk behind it and three days to get back,” Yusaku Maezawa said in a video on Tuesday. “I’ll pay for the whole trip.”
Applications must be submitted by March 14, and the first screenings will begin shortly thereafter. Final interviews and medical examinations are planned by the end of May.
The mission to fly around the moon and back – called dearMoon – is scheduled for 2023 on a SpaceX Starship. 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 Starship test flights ended in an explosive landing.
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 contain a total of 10-12 people, including the eight civilians. “I hope we can make it a fun trip together,” Maezawa said.
Maezawa’s initial plan two years ago was to invite artists on the trip, but the plan has since ‘evolved’ as he decides ‘artist’ is too ambiguous a term.
“Every person who does something creative can be called an artist … and that’s why I wanted to reach a wider, more diverse audience.”
Maezawa said there are two important criteria for those who want to fly to space with him: a willingness to push the envelope to create a better society, and a willingness to push others, including crew members, in their pursuit support.
“These two criteria are the key to selecting eight crew members,” he said.
In the video, Musk pointed out that the mission will be the first commercial spaceflight with humans traveling beyond Earth’s orbit. It will actually go past the moon, Musk said, so “we expect humans to go further than any human ever from planet Earth.”
It is unclear how much the lunar mission Maezawa costs. In 2018, Musk just said it’s a lot of money ‘. But Maezawa is no stranger to haunting – he spent a record $ 110.5 million on a Basquiat painting at a 2017 auction, admitting he lost $ 41 million in day trading in 2020 .