The first space tourist to fly around the Moon with SpaceX, the private space flight company of Elon Musk will be Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire founder of the ZoZo clothing company.
“Finally, I can tell you, ‘I choose to go to the moon,'” Maezawa said to applause from the audience during the press conference. “Since I was a child, I’ve loved the Moon, just watching the Moon filled my imagination, it’s always there and it has continued to inspire humanity, that’s why I can not let this opportunity go by.”
he funny thing is that he does not want to go alone. Maezawa said he plans to “go to the moon with artists.” According to the billionaire, he will take six to eight artists on his incredible space trip.
If the trip is done as planned (something that could happen if we look back), Maezawa will approach the Moon in 2023 in the new Big Falcon Rocket design.
The trip would put the Japanese businessman and billionaire in a privileged position, since only 24 people have visited the Moon, according to information from NASA. The last time humans made this journey was in December 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission manned by NASA astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans.
“The intention is to help advance the rocket technology to become a kind of multiple planets and a true space civilization,” said visionary Elon Musk during the press conference.
Destination: the Moon
The CEO of SpaceX announced for the first time that the company would send tourists to the moon in February 2017. However, that mission, which would have used the Falcon Heavy rocket and the Dragon capsule of the company, never materialized.
How much did the space ticket cost?
The trip will be expensive. SpaceX did not disclose how much Maezawa paid, but it is clear that the number will have many zeros. In June, for example, the private company Axiom Space announced that from 2020 it would offer 10-day trips to the International Space Station (ISS) for 55 million dollars.
Musk and other entrepreneurs of private space flights have made an effort to fill the gap in this regard, with spacecraft that can take crew members to the ISS and beyond. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft already carry round-trip cargo between Earth and the ISS; In the same way, the company hopes to use its rockets to take humans into space.
Maezawa founded the largest online shopping center in Japan, Zozotown.
