Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/TOKYO: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on Friday announced the eight crew members accompanying him on a trip around the moon aboard a still under-development SpaceX rocket in 2023.
Maezawa booked every seat on the maiden lunar voyage, which has been in the works since 2018. He initially announced to take six-to-eight artists with him, but later changed the entry requirements to a competition that applicants had to apply for online.
The eight people chosen were American YouTuber Tim Dodd, DJ and producer Steve Aoki of the United States; Czech artist Yemi AD, Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam, British photographer Karim Iliya, a filmmaker from the US Brendan Hall, Indian actor Dev Joshi, and K-pop music artist TOP from South Korea.
He announced the picks on Twitter and at a website for what he dubbed the #dearMoon Project.
The historic lunar voyage
As mentioned in a mission profile graphic on the dearMoon website, the trip would be six days long and circumnavigate the moon without landing.
After completion, SpaceX’s Starship will be the most powerful rocket ever built. Although its upper stage has been successfully tested in flights within the atmosphere; however, the company has yet to test the rocket in an orbital flight, something the CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly promised will be done by the end of 2022.
Japanese entrepreneur who founded the country’s largest online fashion mall ‘Start Today’ flew last year to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket. He reportedly paid 10 billion yen ($73 million) for the outer space trip.
