SpaceX announced Monday night that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online fashion mall Zozotown, will be the first paying passenger on its BFR spacecraft on a trip around the Moon. The trip is announced to launch in 2023, though CEO Elon Musk admitted that there were a lot of uncertainties around that date.Intriguingly, Maezawa stated that he didn't just buy one seat on the trip. He bought an entire spaceship, and he intends to people it with six to eight artists from different countries representing different styles of art. The goal of Maezawa's project is for the artists to be inspired by the journey and create art about it when they go back to Earth.
"I hope that this project will inspire the dreamer within each of us," Maezawa wrote on the website for the project, #DearMoon.
The exact price Maezawa paid was not disclosed during the press conference announcing the launch. "But it'll be free for the artists!" Musk said.
SpaceX had announced in 2017 that two then-unnamed passengers had booked passage for a lunar flyby in a Falcon Heavy rocket that was to launch in 2018. Musk revealed that Maezawa was one of the original customers but that the Falcon Heavy would be able to take only two people around the moon. BFR, in contrast, will have room for many more people.
That's much to Maezawa's delight. "I love art and I look forward to seeing what different artists working together bring to life," he said.
The trip, according to SpaceX, will take four or five days, and the spacecraft will be 125 miles from the moon at its closest point.
At the press conference, Musk unveiled what he stated was likely the final iteration of the design of the BFR spacecraft. The first prototype spacecraft is under construction, according to Musk, and its Raptor engines have been tested. Musk said that if all goes well, it should conduct its first test flights in two or three years.
Under the current design, the BFR will be 118 meters long, with a payload capacity of 1100 cubic meters and 100 metric tons. It will have seven of the Raptor engines, each capable of 200 tons of thrust.
This announcement comes at a rough time for Elon Musk, who's faced criticism for apparently smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan podcast and is now facing libel litigation from a rescue diver who helped save a soccer team in Thailand this past summer.
That said, SpaceX has had one of the best years in its history. It has had 16 successful launches, including the first launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket. It has also announced the first astronauts who will be part of its crewed Dragon program, which is contracted with NASA to take astronauts to the International Space Station.
Although this project is certainly important for Elon Musk's long-term goal to travel to Mars, the CEO reiterated that the company's priorities are its missions for NASA and its national security launches. The first crewed flight to the space station is slated for 2019 and is the company's "top priority," according to Musk, who said the company is using less than 5% of its resources toward the BFR project.
"This is still quite a small portion of SpaceX's resources," he said.
I'm an Associate Editor at Forbes covering science and research-based startups.