ORLANDO, Fla. — The Japanese billionaire who was the first commercial customer for SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft has suddenly pulled the plug on his proposed fantasy mission around the moon.
In a letter dated June 1, Yusaku Maezawa announced that he had canceled his “dearMoon” mission, which would have flown him and eight artists around the moon on a Starship. He pointed to the ongoing delays in the mission and uncertainty about its launch date.
“Arrangements have been made with SpaceX to target a launch by the end of 2023,” the DearMoon project said in a statement. statement Posted on its website. “However, unfortunately, a launch in 2023 has become unfeasible, and without a clear near-term timeline, Maezawa has with a heavy heart made the inevitable decision to cancel the project.”
“I signed the contract in 2018 under the assumption that DearMoon would be launched by the end of 2023,” Maezawa said. to publish on social media on June 1. “I cannot plan for my future in this situation, and I feel bad about making crew members wait any longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this time.”
Maezawa was the first customer SpaceX announced for Starship at a September 2018 event at SpaceX headquarters, when the vehicle was still known as the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket. Maezawa made a down payment of an undisclosed size, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described as a “non-trivial amount” that would have a “material impact on the BFR program.”
At the time, the goal was to launch the mission by 2023, but even then Musk warned that timeline may not be achievable. He said at the time: “You have to set a date, which is the date when things will go well.” “Of course we have a reality, and things are not going well in reality.”
The spacecraft has not yet traveled to the moon, carried humans, or even reached orbit. SpaceX is preparing for a fourth integrated Starship/Super Heavy test flight, scheduled no later than June 6, that will fly the vehicle on a suborbital trajectory with the primary goal of showing that both the Super Heavy booster and Starship’s upper stage can return to the surface. Without breaking it first.
SpaceX has increasingly focused on getting Starship flying so it can make a crewed lunar landing for NASA under a Human Landing System contract awarded in 2021. The company is also working to increase Starship’s flight rate to support launches of Starlink satellites.
However, Maezawa was also slow in choosing people to accompany him. Only in December 2022 did DearMoon publicly reveal the eight people who would be traveling with Maezawa on the mission, along with two alternates. However, by then, it was clear that Starship would not be ready to fly the mission in 2023 or perhaps several years later, and the project did not provide a timeline for the mission when it announced the crewing.
Some of the people chosen for DearMoon spoke out on social media after Maezawa announced the cancellation. “We had no prior knowledge of this possibility.” He said Tim Dowd, a YouTube personality known as the “Everyday Astronaut.” “I expressed my views, even before the announcement, that DearMoon is unlikely to happen in the next few years.”
He added that he was “extremely disappointed” by the decision. “I slowly allowed myself to imagine a trip to the moon little by little.”
“We were dropped apparently out of impatience.” He said Rhiannon Adam, the Irish photographer who was the only woman on DearMoon’s main crew, offered a sharp criticism of Maezawa’s decision. “As a critically minded person, a lot of this doesn’t make sense, especially in terms of the timeline. I never believed we would go to 2023 or 2024.”
She said she and the others selected to participate in DearMoon were willing to wait but were not consulted by Maezawa before the cancellation was announced. “It left me questioning the integrity of the project, and feeling exploited.”
Maezawa has been able to go to space, but not with SpaceX. In December 2021, he and co-pilot Yuzo Hirano flew on a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, spending a week and a half in space before returning. This mission was arranged by Space Adventures, a space tourism company.
There’s another Starship commercial lunar mission: In October 2022, Dennis Tito, the first commercial space tourist to visit the International Space Station in 2001, announced that he and his wife would travel on a Starship mission around the moon with up to 10 other people. Neither he nor SpaceX announced a date for the mission at the time or provided updates on its status since then.
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