Elon Musk’s company has announced the first space tourist to be sent around the Moon. The lucky guy is Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese online fashion tycoon.
Maezawa will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on a monster SpaceX rocket, the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
Artists to turn the trip into an art project
It will be approximately seven-day trip, and they plan to fly on the trip as early as 2023. Maezawa plans to take six to eight artists along to turn the entire ride into an art project called #dearMoon.
Maezawa, who is 42, is chief executive of Japan’s largest online fashion mall, and has a current net worth of $2.9 billion.
Maezawa said, “Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the Moon! I choose to go to the moon with artists!” “I would like to invite six to eight artists from around the world to join me on this mission to the Moon,”
He added, “These artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth, and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within all of us.”
Free trip for the artists
It was actually Maezawa who came to SpaceX with this idea. Maezawa don’t want to share the amount he paid for the flight, but he clarified that the trip will be free for the artists who go with him.
Musk informed that the down payment by Maezawa was significant and it will “have a material effect on paying for cost and development of BFR.”
