Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will not shoot to the moon with SpaceX’s Starship after all.
Maezawa, who booked a private trip around the moon in 2018 on SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket, has now scrapped the project – which he called dearMoon – after the rocket wasn’t ready to fly him and eight hand-picked artists in 2023.
“I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that DearMoon would be launched in late 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 Starship can launch.”
SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy booster are the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket to ever fly. The company launched its first unmanned Starship test flight in April 2023, but did not reach space. A second test in November 2023 flew higher but also failed. Starship first reached space on March 14 this year in an orbital velocity test, but the Starship and its Super Heavy booster did not survive their intended landing points.
SpaceX is preparing to launch its fourth Starship test flight on June 5 as part of its development of a manned spacecraft to land NASA Artemis astronauts on the moon by 2026.
Maezawa said uncertainty about when Starship would be ready to fly its DearMoon mission led him to cancel the flight.
“I cannot plan my future in this situation, and I hate that the crew members have to wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this time,” Maezawa wrote on X. “I apologize to those who were excited about this project is going to happen.”
In December 2022, Maezawa selected a team of eight artists and makers to join him on his sweet moon flight, but their moon dreams have been shattered. The crew included: Tim Dodd, creator of the YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut; DJ and electronic music producer Steve Aoki; artist and choreographer Yemi AD; photographer Karim Iliya; filmmaker Brendan Hall; Indian TV 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 competition to find a partner to fly around the moon with him on the DearMoon flight, but it was canceled shortly after the announcement.
“And just like that, my crew’s dreams are over,” Dodd wrote on X after Maezawa announced DearMoon’s cancellation.
“I am extremely disappointed because I have been dreaming about this mission since I first heard about it in 2018 and even more so over the past three years since the selection process began. I slowly allowed myself to imagine a journey to the moon to imagine bit,” Dodd added. “On the other hand, I feel guilty because I’m angry about a gift that was revoked. Part of me feels like I have no right to grieve, because I had no right to be on this mission in the first place.”
Dodd said he probably would have thought about joining the project if he had known it could be canceled so soon after the announcement.
“If I had known this could have ended within a year and a half of the public announcement, 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 had only been announced two years earlier) would need about $5 billion to become operational, with Maezawa a would contribute a significant portion of that financing. Since then, SpaceX has won a NASA contract to fly the agency’s Artemis 3 on land astronauts on the moon by 2026, as well as an unmanned landing test.
US billionaire Jared Isaacman, meanwhile, has booked Starship’s first crewed orbital flight as part of his three-mission Polaris program, which also aims to conduct the first private spacewalk on a SpaceX Dragon capsule later this year. SpaceX has also booked a private spaceship trip around the moon for billionaire Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko. Tito became the world’s first space tourist when he purchased a trip to the International Space Station in 2001, brokered by Space Adventures.
To reach the moon, SpaceX has said it will require at least “ten-ish” refueling missions alone to refuel Starship for a trip to the moon (the company has not yet achieved full orbit with Starship or demonstrated a full refueling flight) . tested fueling technology during its third Starship test flight in March.
Maezawa did not wait for Starship to complete its goal of reaching space. In December 2021, he flew himself and a videographer to the International Space Station for a twelve-day journey. 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 territories, while we ourselves will move on to the next challenge,” his team at DearMoon said in a statement.