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On Friday evening, the DearMoon project – a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and ten other “crew members” on a flight around the moon aboard SpaceX’s Starship vehicle – was abruptly canceled.
“It is sad to announce that ‘dearMoon’, the first private project to fly around the moon, will be canceled,” said the mission’s official account on the social media site and apologize to those who have been looking forward to this project.”
Shortly afterwards, the project’s financier and his ‘crew leader’, Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision to X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the DearMoon mission would launch in late 2023. .
“It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s still uncertain when Starship might launch,” he wrote. “In this situation, I cannot plan my future, and I hate that the crew members have to wait longer. Hence the difficult decision to cancel at this time. I apologize to those who were enthusiastic about the realization of this project.”
The mission would be Starship’s first crewed space flight that would launch from Earth, fly around the moon and return. It’s not happening now. Why did this happen and what does it mean?
Origin of the mission
Maezawa and Musk made the announcement side by side at SpaceX’s rocket factory in Hawthorne in September 2018. It was a strange but important moment. It seemed significant that SpaceX signed its first commercial contract for the massive Starship rocket. And while the value was not disclosed, Maezawa injected something in the low hundreds of millions of dollars into the program.
However, Maezawa always came across as a bit non-serious. He said he would hold a competition to fill ten other seats on board the vehicle. “I didn’t want to have such an amazing experience alone,” he said. “I would be a little lonely.” Later he selected a team of creative people.
Initially, however, Maezawa took the project seriously. When I watched the very first Starship hop test in July 2019, there were only a handful of visitors there to watch the short flight of ‘Starhopper’. One of them was a representative of Maezawa who kept a close eye on Starship’s progress.
As major space projects do – and to no one’s surprise – Starship was lagging behind in its development. The first test flight didn’t take place 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 had to complete: safe launch, controlled flight into space, safe landing of the Starship upper stage, refueling in space, habitability in space and more. much more.
With Starship’s fourth test flight just days away, as early as June 5, SpaceX has so far demonstrated that it can launch Starship safely. So it remains at the beginning of a challenging technical journey.
A turning point
One of the biggest impacts on the DearMoon project occurred in April 2021, when NASA selected the Starship vehicle as the lunar lander for its Artemis program. This put the large vehicle on the critical path for NASA’s ambitious program to land humans on the moon’s surface. It also offered an order of magnitude more funding, $2.9 billion, and the promise of more if SpaceX could deliver a vehicle to take humans from lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back.
Since then, SpaceX has had two clear priorities for its Starship program. The first of these is to become operational and deploy 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 no longer prioritized. In recent months it became clear that if Maezawa’s mission were to happen, it would not take place until the early 1930s – at least ten years after the original plan.
Fortunes change
In the meantime, Maezawa’s priorities have likely changed as well. According to Forbes, when the plan was announced in 2018, the entrepreneur had a net worth of about $3 billion. Today it is estimated at only half that. Additionally, he scratched the surface of his desire to go to space in 2021 as he flew aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle for a 12-day trip to the International Space Station.
Maezawa has been rumored for a while, ever since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. (This is a clear sign of his disfavor. Musk has unfollowed me twice on Twitter/X after stories or interactions he didn’t like.) It is likely that the combination of development delays and Maezawa’s personal fortune led to the parties dissolving the project.
All this leaves a clearer path open for Starship: become operational, start flying Starlink satellites, and start checking off the technical challenges for Artemis. In a few years, the company will turn its attention to the challenging prospect of launching humans from Earth in Starship and then landing back on the planet. The first of these people will be another billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has already flown Crew Dragon and is planning at least two more such flights before the groundbreaking Starship mission.