SpaceX's Elon Musk plans to fly a Japanese billionaire and several artists on a tourist trip around the moon

Elon Musk has attempted to write the next chapter in his quest to open space to the masses by announcing Monday night the first paid tourist that his company, SpaceX, is seeking to travel around the moon. Speaking at SpaceX headquarters outside Los Angeles, he introduced Yusaku Maezawa, a billionaire Japanese entrepreneur who founded fashion brand Zozo.

"Finally, I can tell you that I chose to go to the moon," Maezawa said.

He said he would invite six to eight artists – sculptors, painters, architects and filmmakers – from around the world to travel with him on a weeklong trip in 2023 which he said would lead to the production of art. "To inspire the dreamer in us all.

Musk would not say what the trip would cost, but he said the design of the Big Falcon rocket, nearly 400 feet high, had recently evolved, with the first flight into orbit coming in two or three years.

He called Maezawa "brave" and "an adventurer".

"It's dangerous to be clear," Musk said. "It's not a walk in the park here, when you push the border, it's not a sure thing.There is a chance that something may go wrong … We'd better take this flight correctly.

Once again, the big news of Musk has been confronted with nagging questions and tumult – this time largely generated by his own behavior.

Over the last few months, Musk has been criticizing analysts for a request for earnings for Tesla, its automaker, for asking "boring and pitiless questions. He accused, without proof, one of the cave divers who participated in the rescue of a Thai football team of young pedophiles. (On Monday, the diver sued him for defamation.) He then pledged to take Tesla privately, claiming that "funding was assured," and then reverse shortly thereafter. And earlier this month, a video of Musk smoking marijuana and drinking whiskey on a popular podcast circulated on social media.

Now, the Elon Musk show has returned to SpaceX's headquarters outside of Los Angeles, where the company – intentionally or unintentionally – aired prime-time issues surrounding its executive director by providing details about his moon-stroke so anticipated.

Last week, SpaceX has posted on Twitter that she "signed the world's first private passenger to ride the moon aboard our [Big Falcon Rocket] – an important step towards the access of ordinary people who dream of traveling in space. Last Sunday, Musk fueled anticipation by posting on Twitter the art renditions of the gigantic launcher that SpaceX is developing to fly into deep space, with a simple message: "#OccupyMars."

But for now, society still has to transport a human being in space. The BFR, as the SpaceX rocket knows to the moon, is developing, perhaps years after flying. SpaceX, which is under contract with NASA to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station, has recently announced that it will postpone the first flight to April.

His plan to make tourists travel around the moon has also been delayed. If all went as planned, SpaceX would now prepare for its first lunar flight, fulfilling its commitment last year to launch two tourists "faster and further than the previous one".

Delays and delays, however, do not deter Musk or his relentless company, which now has 7,000 employees. SpaceX has achieved feats that nobody thought possible, since the first successful launch in orbit ten years ago, at the beginning of the year, when the maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket drove a Tesla Roadster to Mars.

While Tesla has been plagued by production problems, SpaceX, which is also led by President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, has been much more stable, achieving 34 rocket launches in the past 20 months. It disrupted the launch market, winning not only billions of dollars in NASA contracts, but also contracts with the Pentagon. He also has a huge backlog of commercial launch contracts.

The rocket factory continues to hum, to the point that during a recent media event to introduce NASA astronauts to fly on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, there was a constant din of the factory that continued without interruption.

"All that noise in the background, it's the sound of the unbelievable things happening," said NASA astronaut Victor Glover.

Musk's vision of an interplanetary future may lie somewhere between dreams and illusion, but at least he has helped to inspire a new generation of enthusiasts, as Apollo did in the 1960s.

For his part, he admitted that much of what he hoped to achieve in space is an aspiration. The goal, he said in an announcement on how to colonize Mars two years ago, was to "make sure that Mars seems possible. To give the impression that this is something we can do in our life. That you can go there.

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