Japanese billionaire opens competition for SpaceX Starship tickets

Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire Japanese fashion CEO who paid a lot of money Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the first seats on his Starship spacecraft for a trip around the Moon in 2023, a recent teased a big announcement regarding the trip. Mystery Solved: Maezawa proclaimed on Tuesday that he was offering anyone interested a fired while joining his crew.

The mission, known as dearMoon, will involve 10 to 12 crewmembers members, with eight slots available to the general public via the mission website. Maezawa appears to be aiming for a quick schedule: pre-registration is scheduled for March 14, 2021, the first screenings being made before March 21. The website claims that the most successful applicants will receive final interviews and medical exams by the end of May 2021. Between that date and the launch date, training will focus on mission training.

The only two qualities required of candidates are that they “push the boundaries” towards improving society and that they support other crew members who do the same. It is hoped that the other crew members will be people skilled in some sort of scientific or technical discipline related to the operation of a spacecraft.

The dearMoon mission is meant to be dramatic proof of Starship’s usefulness, Musk says the spacecraft will eventually carry SpaceX-backed colonists and up to 100 tonnes of cargo per trip to the planet Mars, and act as a sort demo for the future of commercial spaceflight. It is planned to consist of a journey of around six days around the moon which Musk says will be the furthest from planet Earth by a human.

Those who are not selected will at the very least receive a consolation prize in the form of a promotional image with their face on it.

“What I look forward to the most is seeing my home planet, the big blue Earth with my own eyes,” Maezawa said in a commentary. promotional video published Tuesday. “And then after we come out of the dark side of the moon, we might be able to see the ‘Earthrise’. Like sunrise, the round shape of the Earth will appear beyond the horizon of the Moon.

“How will we feel when we experience something so phenomenal?” Maezawa added, saying his main motivations for taking the flight included satisfying his curiosity, remembering how precious the Earth is and “remembering how small, insignificant I am. In space, I think I’ll realize how small I am, how much I still have to experience, how much harder I should work, and how much I should grow taller.

Maezawa is a known advertising dog whose lunar ambitions seem to coincide with imperatives of clothing marketing, and he had previously announced (and unfortunately abandoned later) a reality TV contest to find a girlfriend ready to fly in space with him. As TechCrunch notedMaezawa’s original plan was to bring in eight artists before he had a revelation that everyone creative is some kind of artist. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that plans for the crew list could change again, even assuming the craft leaves the ground in 2023 as Musk currently says he will.

Little news has emerged about the dearMoon project since its launch in 2018, although SpaceX works regularly on Starship. SpaceX’s SN9 rocket, a prototype of the spacecraft, experienced what the company called “quick and unplanned dismantlingIn a high altitude launch test last month, a euphemism for engine problems during landing that led to the craft being erased. Another SpaceX prototype, SN8, suffered a similar fate during a test in December 2020. Several models of previous tests either exploded, burst or collapsed in on themselves before that. The Federal Aviation Administration launched an investigation in the February 2021 incident amid reports that SpaceX had violated safety rules in previous tests, but later issued a clear all for the company to start an SN10 prototype in the coming days.