Japanese billionaire becomes first person to book a trip to the Moon
(Baonghean) - Japanese billionaire Yasaku Maezawa, 42 years old, founder of online retailer Zozo, will become the first tourist to travel to the Moon on a SpaceX spacecraft owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
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| Japanese billionaire Yasaku Maezawa, 42, founder of online retailer Zozo. Photo: AFP |
Yasaku Maezawa said he will invite 6-8 people who are artists, architects, designers and other creative people to join him on a week-long journey around the Moon on SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
Maezawa hopes his fellow travelers will be inspired to create new works of art upon their return to Earth and inspire others. The trip is scheduled for 2023. Space's first passengers will join a long list of the super-rich and famous who have booked seats on space flights.
Currently, the two-story BFR spacecraft, measuring 118 meters long and weighing an estimated 1,000 cubic meters, is still under construction. Musk, the boss of SpaceX, said he wants the ship to be ready to carry crews by 2023 and be able to connect Earth to “anywhere in the solar system.”
Regarding the cost of the trip around the Moon, billionaire Musk revealed that Mr. Maezawa paid a lot of money but refused to disclose the exact figure.
It is known that billionaire Maezawa is the founder of online retailer Zozo with assets worth about 3 billion USD, ranked 18th among the richest people in Japan by Forbes.
Previously, in early 2015, he was first listed as a billionaire in the world with a total asset value at that time of 1.3 billion USD.
In Japan, billionaire Maezawa has established a foundation to support creativity and raise awareness, as well as established a contemporary art museum in Chiba city, east of Tokyo.
With his trip, Mr. Maezawa will become the first passenger to travel to the Moon since the US Apollo missions ended in 1972.
Billionaire Maezawa's journey around the Moon is expected to take the race to commercialize space tourism to a new level.
By 2019, SpaceX is hoping to become the first private company in history to send astronauts to the International Space Station.
In addition to SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin company and Virgin Galactic, co-founders of Amazon.com, are also racing to develop on the path to commercializing space tourism.
