dearMoon: the crew of the first tourist mission to the Moon has been announced
Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur, art collector, and space tourist Maezawa Yūsaku has announced the crew of dearMoon, a tourist mission to the Moon that he finances with his own money. The crew included photographers, YouTubers, musicians, movie actors, and people from other creative professions.
dearMoon included:
- Maezawa Yūsaku – a Japanese entrepreneur;
- Steve Aoki – American musician, producer, DJ;
- Choi Seung Hyun aka T.O.P – a South Korean rapper and actor ;
- Yemi Akinyemi Dele aka Yemi A.D. – Czech choreographer, performer, artist;
- Rhiannon Adam – an Irish photographer;
- Tim Dodd – an American YouTuber and the author of the website Everyday Astronaut;
- Karim Iliya – a British photographer;
- Brendan Hall – an American filmmaker;
- Dev Joshi – an Indian film actor;
- Kaitlyn Farrington – an American snowboarder;
- Miyu – a Japanese dancer.
9 people from this list are part of the main crew, Kaitlyn Farrington and Miyu are backups.
Maezawa Yūsaku is the founder of the fashionable clothing store Zozotown and the ZOZO brand, and has a fortune of about $2 billion. In December 2021, he and video director Yozo Hirano made a flight to the ISS on the Soyuz MS-20 ship.
The dearMoon mission, which includes a lunar flyby, is scheduled to take place in 2023 aboard the SpaceX Starship. As you know, Starship’s first test flight is scheduled for December 2022, and something tells us that dearMoon’s launch date will be pushed back several more times.
According to Maezawa Yūsaku, all participants of the dearMoon project will receive an incredible creative impulse that will allow them to create new works of art that have not yet been seen by earthlings.
Of course, this all sounds a little wild, but if we are already preparing to send artists to the Moon, then space has really become much closer to all of us.