Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa won’t be shooting for the moon in SpaceX’s Starship.
Maezawa, who booked a private trip around the moon on SpaceX’s Starship megarocket in 2018, has now canceled the project – which he called dearMoon – as the rocket was not ready to fly him and eight hand-picked artists in 2023 .
“I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon will launch by the end of 2023,” Maezawa said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter). “It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s still uncertain when the Starship might launch.”
SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy booster make up the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. The company launched its first unmanned Starship test flight in April 2023, but it failed to reach space. A second test in November 2023 flew higher but also failed. Starship reached space for the first time on March 14 this year in a test that reached orbital speed, but its Starship booster and Super Heavy did not survive the intended drop points.
SpaceX is preparing to launch its fourth Starship test flight on June 5 as part of its development of a crewed Starship to land NASA Artemis astronauts on the Moon by 2026.
Maezawa said the uncertainty of when the Starship would be ready to fly its DearMoon mission caused it to cancel the flight.
“I can’t plan my future in this situation and I feel terrible making crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time,” Maezawa wrote on X. “I apologize to those who were excited for this project to happen”.
In December 2022, Maezawa selected a crew of eight artists and creators to join him on his beloved flight to the moon, but those hopeful astronauts have had their lunar dreams dashed. The crew included: Tim Dodd, creator of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel; electronic music DJ and producer Steve Aoki; artist and choreographer Yemi AD; photographer Karim Iliya; director Brendan Hall; Indian TV actor Dev Joshi; and South Korean rapper TOP Two backup crew members, ballerina Miyu and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington, were also selected.
Maezawa also held a short-lived girlfriend contest to find a partner to fly around the moon with him in the DearMoon flight, but it was canceled shortly after its announcement.
“And just like that, my crew’s dreams are over,” Dodd wrote on X after Maezawa announced dearMoon’s cancellation.
“I am extremely disappointed, as I have dreamed of this mission since I first heard about it in 2018 and even more so for the last 3 years since the selection process began. I slowly allowed myself to imagine a trip to Little by little, Dodd added. Part of me doesn’t feel like I have a right to grieve because I wasn’t eligible for this mission in the first place.”
Dodd said he likely would have had second thoughts about joining the project if he had known it could be canceled so soon after it was announced.
“Had I known this could have ended within a year and a half of the public announcement, I never would have accepted,” Dodd said. “We had no prior knowledge of this possibility.”
When Maezawa announced the dearMoon mission in 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company’s Starship program (which had been announced just two years earlier) would take about $5 billion to get up and running, with Maezawa contributing a portion principal of that funding. Since then, SpaceX has secured a NASA contract to fly the agency’s Artemis 3 to Earth astronauts on the Moon by 2026, as well as an unmanned landing test.
American billionaire Jared Isaacman, meanwhile, has booked the first crewed orbital flight of Starship as part of his three-mission Polaris Program, which also aims to fly the first private spacewalk in a SpaceX Dragon capsule later this year. year. SpaceX has also booked another private Starship trip around the moon for billionaire Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko. Tito became the world’s first space tourist when he purchased a trip to the International Space Station brokered by Space Adventures in 2001.
To get to the moon, SpaceX has said it would take at least “ten” refueling missions just to fuel Starship for a trip to the moon (the company has yet to achieve a full orbit with Starship or demonstrate a full flight of fuel, though it did test the fuel technology on Starship’s third test flight in March.
Maezawa did not wait for the Starship to be ready in its goal of reaching space. In December 2021, he flew himself and a videographer to the International Space Station for a 12-day journey. He said he wishes SpaceX’s Starship team the best as the company continues to develop the rocket.
“We will have deep respect for SpaceX as they continue to venture into uncharted territory, while we ourselves move on to the next challenge,” his dearMoon team said in a statement.
