SpaceX plans to send tourists around the moon

CAP CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – SpaceX said it signed the first private moon traveler, with some modifications to its original game plan.

The big revelation about who he is – and when the flight to the moon will be – will be announced Monday at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

This is not the same mission that the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, described last year. The initial plan was for two paying passengers to tour the moon this year, using a Falcon Heavy rocket and a Dragon crew capsule.

At the time, Mr. Musk testified that the two men asked SpaceX to send them a one-week flight and that they had paid a "substantial" deposit for the trip.

The new strategy is to continue flying around the moon, but using an even larger and developing SpaceX rocket that has its own passenger ship. And now, it seems that there will be only one person on board.

Since this new BFR rocket, as it has been dubbed, has not yet been built, the flight is probably at least a few years old.

On Thursday, SpaceX launched the teaser via Twitter and Musk also tweeted the news. Company representatives declined to offer additional details on Friday.

The ultimate goal of Musk is to colonize Mars. This lunar mission – an overflight and not a landing – represents "an important step towards the access of ordinary people who dream of traveling in space," SpaceX said in a tweet.

On its website, SpaceX boasts of the mission "first passenger on lunar BFR flights", which implies that there will be more.

This could be the first lunar visit of mankind since 1972, depending on the shape of NASA's last lunar planes. Twenty-four NASA astronauts flew to the moon from 1968 to 1972, and only 12 of them ran across its dusty surface. Next July, we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11.

NASA turns for its own flight over the moon, with a crew, around 2023. The space agency aims to build a bridge near the moon, with its staff, in the 2020s. It is envisaged as the basis for exploration of the moon, Mars and beyond.