Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa won’t be shooting for the moon in a SpaceX spacecraft after all.
Maezawa, who booked a private trip around the moon on SpaceX’s Starship megarocket in 2018, has now canceled the project – which he called dearMoon – after the rocket was not ready to fly with him and eight hand-picked artists in 2023.
“I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon will launch by the end of 2023,” Maezawa said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter). “It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s still uncertain when the Starship can launch.”
SpaceX’s starship and Super Heavy booster form the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. The company launched its first unmanned Starship test flight in April 2023, but it failed to reach space. A second test in November 2023 flew higher but also failed. The Starship first entered space on March 14 of this year in a test that reached orbital velocity, but its Starship and Super Heavy booster did not survive to the intended splashdown points.
SpaceX is set to launch its fourth Starship test flight on June 5 as part of its development of a crewed starship to land NASA’s Artemis astronauts on the moon by 2026.
Maezawa said uncertainty about when the starship would be ready to fly its expensive lunar mission led him to cancel the flight.
“In this situation, I can’t plan my future and I feel terrible for keeping crew members waiting longer, so it’s a hard decision to cancel at this time,” Maezawa wrote on X. “I apologize to those who were excited for this project to happen.”
In December 2022, Maezawa selected a crew of eight artists and creators to join him on his expensive flight to the moon, but these astronaut hopefuls had their lunar dreams dashed. Crew members: Tim Dodd, creator of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel; DJ and electronic music producer Steve Aoki; artist and choreographer Yemi AD; photographer Karim Iliya; filmmaker Brendan Hall; Indian television actor Dev Joshi; and South Korean rapper TOP Two backup crew members, dancer Miyu and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington, were also selected.
Maezawa also held a short-lived girlfriend contest to find a partner to fly around the moon with him on the DearMoon flight, but it was canceled shortly after it was announced.
“And just like that, my crew’s dreams are over,” Dodd wrote on X after Maezawa announced the cancellation of dearMoon.
“I am extremely disappointed because I have dreamed of this mission since I first heard about it in 2018, and even more so in the last 3 years since the tender began. I have slowly allowed myself to imagine going to the moon bit by bit. ” a little bit,” Dodd added. “On the other hand, I feel guilty for being upset about a gift that was revoked. Part of me doesn’t feel like I have a right to grieve because I had no right to be on this mission in the first place.”
Dodd said he likely would have had second thoughts about joining the project if he had known it could be canceled so soon after it was announced.
“If I had known it could end within a year and a half of publication, I would never have agreed to it,” Dodd said. “We were not aware of this possibility in advance.”
When Maezawa announced the dearMoon mission in 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company’s Starship program (which was announced just two years ago) would need about $5 billion to get off the ground, with Maezawa contributing a key part of that funding. Since then, SpaceX has secured NASA’s contract to land the agency’s Artemis 3 astronauts on the moon by 2026 as well as an unmanned landing test.
American billionaire Jared Isaacman, meanwhile, has booked the first crewed starship orbital flight as part of his three-mission Polaris program, which also aims to fly the first private spacewalk on a SpaceX Dragon capsule later this year. SpaceX also booked another private starship trip around the moon for billionaire Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko. Tito became the world’s first space tourist when he bought a trip to the International Space Station through Space Adventures in 2001.
SpaceX said it would take at least “ten” refueling missions to reach the moon to refuel Starship for the trip to the moon (the company has yet to achieve full orbit with Starship or demonstrate a full refueling flight, though it has tested refueling technology on on its third Starship test flight in March.
Maezawa did not wait for the starship to be ready in its goal to reach space. In December 2021, he flew alone and a cameraman to the International Space Station for a 12-day trip. He said he wishes SpaceX’s Starship team the best as the company continues to develop the rocket.
“We will have deep respect for SpaceX as they continue to venture into uncharted territory while we ourselves move on to the next challenge,” his dear Moon team said in a statement.