SpaceX moon mission: Elon Musk names tourist to ride Big Falcon Rocket

A
Sept. 2018 rendering of SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket launching
through the cloud tops and toward space.

Elon
Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

• Elon Musk and his rocket
  company, SpaceX, plan to launch a private
  passenger named Yusaku Maezawa around the moon.

• Yusaku Maezawa is
  a Japanese entrepreneur and art collector. If all
  goes according to plan, Maezawa will take a lunar voyage on
  the Big
  Falcon Rocket, or BFR: a launch system that SpaceX is
  developing to colonize Mars.

• Maezawa purchased all seats on the spaceship, and
  plans to select six to eight artists from a variety of
  disciplines to take the lunar journey with him in
  2023.

• The mission won’t land on the surface of the moon but
  will ferry Maezawa and his artist crewmates around Earth’s
  natural satellite.

HAWTHORNE, California — Elon Musk and his rocket company,
SpaceX, have
revealed who will fly their spaceship around the moon for the
first time: a Japanese entrepreneur named Yusaku Maezawa.

Maezawa was a skateboarder and drummer in his youth, and
founded the fashion label Zozo 20 years ago. 

Maezawa announced on Monday that he plans to select six to eight
artists to accompany him on his journey around the moon. 

If all goes according to plan, Maezawa and his artist crew may
become the first people to fly SpaceX’s Big
Falcon Rocket — a
new launch system that’s being designed to
colonize Mars — and also the first-ever private lunar tourist
in history.

SpaceX’s
rendering of a Big Falcon Rocket spaceship carrying a passenger
around the moon.

SpaceX/Twitter

According to Musk’s
latest presentation about the BFR, the launch system
will be 347 feet tall and 30 feet wide.

It’s 16-story spaceship, which will ride atop a 19-story rocket
booster, is expected to carry up to 100 people and 150 tons of
supplies to the Martian surface. 

The mission is slated to launch as soon as 2023.

SpaceX is currently prototyping
the spaceship and other BFR hardware inside a
20,000-square-foot tent at the Port of Los Angeles — at
least until a
much bigger permanent facility is completed.

Prior to Monday’s announcement, Musk last publicly described the
BFR and showed renderings of the system at the 2017 International
Aeronautical Congress.

The design has since changed, based on new renderings revealed
Monday. Aerospace experts who follow Musk and SpaceX’s activities
suggest there could be more iterations before the company’s first
lunar voyage lifts off the launch pad. 

“Elon is an incrementalist and to a great extent he is always
thinking aloud,” Greg Autry, the director of the
Southern California Spaceflight Initiative, told Business Insider
in an email. “I think it is really healthy to see this iterative
change happening, because I believe we can assume it is based on
actual development and simulation going on.”

But Musk said “this is the final iteration in terms of broad
architectural design” in the announcement on Monday. 

This story is developing. Please refresh this page for
updates.

Dana Varinsky contributed reporting to this post.