SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing retailer, will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on the company’s future massive rocket, the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR). Maezawa plans to fly on the trip as early as 2023, and he wants to take artists with him to turn the entire ride into an art project called #dearMoon. A website for the mission
went live after the announcement. The 42-year-old Japanese billionaire posted cryptic messages on his Instagram and Twitter accounts minutes before SpaceX's announcement. Maezawa founded Japan's largest online fashion mall, Zozotown, and custom-fit clothing label Zozo, and his net worth is
reported to be $2.9 billion. His mail-order music album business, Start Today, was his real breakthrough, though, and is now listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He will become the first non-American to orbit the moon.
"Finally I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon," said Maezawa. "At the same time, I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself .. I want to share this experience with as many people as possible.
“I would like to invite six to eight artists from around the world to join me on this mission to the Moon,” he said. “These artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth, and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within all of us.” Maezawa says he hasn’t decided which artists he’d like to invite yet, but he would like them to represent many different fields, such as painters, musicians, film directors, and more. Maezawa says he was inspired by imagining what his favorite artists would have created if they had traveled to space. “What if Picasso had gone to the Moon? Or Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or John Lennon?” he asked at the event. “What about Coco Chanel? These are all artists that I adore.” He has not decided which artists to invite, but will be reaching out to painters, sculptors, film directors, architects, fashion designers and others. Maezawa declined to say how much he's paying for the flight, but Musk said it'll be free for the artists. Going forward, Musk and Maezawa will figure out details like training, but "nothing's written in stone."
But this isn't an just a space tourism flight like those being envisioned by Virgin Galactic. SpaceX has bigger plans.
Musk posted photos Sunday showing a huge rocket that will be used for the mission, which also happens to be the one that the company plans to use to create a Mars colony in the next decade. The hashtag on his next tweet was #OccupyMars.
The drawings show a huge rocket with fins in its midsection.
SpaceX calls the rocket the BFR, which officially stand for Big Falcon Rocket, though the F in the name is more commonly thought to stand for something else.
With the launch of a satellite earlier this month, SpaceX said it now has 60 successful blastoffs. The company currently has the Falcon and Falcon Heavy rockets.
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