Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On Friday night, Project dearMoon — a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other “crew members” on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX’s SpaceX spacecraft — was abruptly canceled.
“It is unfortunate that we announce that ‘dearMoon’, the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled,” the mission’s official X social media account said. “We thank everyone who supported us and apologize to those who were looking forward to this project .”
Shortly after, the financial backer of the project and its “crew leader”, Yusaku Maezawa, explained the decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said that the DearMoon mission was expected to be launched by the end of 2023. .
“It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s still uncertain when Starship can launch,” he wrote. “I can’t plan for my future in this situation and I feel terrible for keeping crew members waiting longer, so it was a difficult decision to cancel at this time. I apologize to those who were excited to see this project happen.”
The mission was to be the first spaceflight of a starship to launch from Earth, orbit the Moon, and return. It’s not happening now. Why did this happen and what does it mean?
The beginnings of the mission
Maezawa and Musk made the announcement side-by-side at the SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne in September 2018. It was kind of a strange but important moment. It seemed significant that SpaceX was signing its first commercial contract for the massive Starship rocket. And while the value was not disclosed, Maezawa was putting something in the low hundreds of millions of dollars into the program.
However, Maezawa has always seemed a little frivolous. He said he would hold a competition to fill 10 more seats on board the vehicle. “I didn’t want to experience such a fantastic experience alone,” he said. “I would be a little lonely. Later he actually selected a team of creative people.
At first, however, Maezawa took the project seriously. When I watched the very first Starship hopper test in July 2019, there were only a few visitors on hand to watch the short flight of the “Starhopper”. One of them was Maezawa’s deputy, who was keeping a close eye on the starship’s progress.
As great space projects do—and to no one’s surprise—Starship fell behind in its development. The first test flight didn’t happen until April 2023, and that was just the beginning. The dearMoon mission was at the very end of a long series of tests that the vehicle must complete: safe launch, controlled flight in space, safe landing of the Starship’s upper stage, refueling in space, habitability in space, and much more.
With the fourth Starship test flight coming in a few days, as early as June 5th, SpaceX has so far demonstrated the ability to safely launch the Starship. So it remains at the beginning of a challenging technical journey.
A turning point
One of the biggest impacts on the dearMoon project came in April 2021 when NASA selected Starship as the lunar lander for its Artemis program. This put the large vehicle on a critical path for NASA’s ambitious program to land humans on the surface of the Moon. It also offered an order of magnitude more funding, $2.9 billion, and the promise of more if SpaceX could deliver a vehicle to transport humans to the surface of the moon from lunar orbit and back.
Since then, SpaceX has had two clear priorities for its Starship program. The first is to commission and begin deploying the larger Starlink satellites. And the second is to use these flights to test technologies needed for NASA’s Artemis program, such as in-space propellant storage and refueling.
As a result, other aspects of the program, including dearMoon, were de-prioritized. In recent months, it has become clear that if Maezawa’s mission were to happen, it would not occur until at least the early 1930s—at least ten years after the original plan.
Changing fortunes
Meanwhile, Maezawa’s priorities also probably changed. According to Forbes, when the plan was announced in 2018, the businessman had a net worth of about $3 billion. Today it is estimated to be worth only half that. In addition, he scratched the surface to go into space in 2021 when he flew aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle for a 12-day trip to the International Space Station.
The writing about Maezawa has been on the wall for a while, as SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. disliked.) It is likely that a combination of development delays and Maezawa’s personal wealth led the parties to dissolve the project.
All of this leaves a clearer path ahead for Starship: Get operational, start flying Starlink satellites, and start ticking off technical challenges for Artemis. Then, in a few years, the company will turn its attention to the challenging prospect of launching humans into a starship from Earth and then landing them back on the planet. The first of these people will be another billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has already flown a Crew Dragon and is planning at least two more such flights before the pioneering Starship mission.