A Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, is looking to take humans further into space than they’ve ever been before. Maezawa announced on March 2nd that he was looking for eight crew members from all over the world for a lunar mission in 2023 called “dearMoon.” Registration is open until March 14th and can be completed on the dearMoon mission’s website.
It will mark the first commercial spaceflight and first private spaceflight with humans beyond Earth orbit. Maezawa’s project will use SpaceX’s Starship to carry an approximately 10-12 person crew. The company is currently testing prototypes, all of which have exploded thus far, but the team is optimistic.
The journey, which is a little bit more than a week around the Moon and back, would mark the first-all civilian mission to go beyond the lunar surface. “This mission we expect people will go further than any human has ever gone from planet Earth,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said.
