Last night Elon Musk announced that Yusaka Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, will be the first passenger onboard SpaceX’s inaugural mission to orbit the moon and the first non-American to make the journey. But he isn’t going alone.
Maezawa is the founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online fashion mall. His net worth is $2.9 billion, according to Forbes. He is an avid art collector, and in 2016 he spent $80 million on paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso, two artists he cited as inspirations during Monday’s event.
“Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the moon,” Maezawa said. “This is my lifelong dream.”
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, introduced Maezawa at a press conference at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The announcement comes a couple of months before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission that sent three nasa astronauts on a historic loop around the moon.
He is using the trip as a way to curate a project which he is calling Dear Moon. The artists, including a photographer, will be expected to contribute something based on the week that they spend in space.
“I choose to go to the Moon, with artists. If Pablo Picasso had been able to see the moon up-close, what kind of paintings would he have drawn? If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today?” Maezawa writes on the website for Dear Moon. “Together with Earth’s top artists, I will be heading to the moon… just a little earlier than everyone else.
Maezawa declined to say how much the BFR ride will cost him, but Musk added, “It’s going to be free for the artists.”
The trip, if successful, would dramatically alter the record of moon travelers. Only 24 people have ever flown to the moon, and 12 of them have walked on its surface. All have been Americans, male, and white, and with fairly similar backgrounds. One private passenger would have made history. But an entire spaceship full of civilians, with different backgrounds, from different nations, would completely rewrite it.
