Bengaluru: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has selected eight people from around the world, including Indian actor Dev Joshi, to fly with him on the first private mission around the Moon and back to Earth.
Those selected are all actors and were reportedly chosen from over 1 million applicants after a Call was put on Twitter in 2021.
The flight is tentatively scheduled for 2023, and all members will fly on a SpaceX rocket for one week. The flight would not land on the Moon, but would only go around it in a lunar path.
The crew includes Maezawa’s favorite artists, Japanese-American DJ Steve Aoki, whose father founded the Benihana restaurant chain, and South Korean rapper Top (Choi Seung-hyun) who came to attention with the K-pop group Big Bang.
flying with them Bal Veer Actor Dev Joshi, filmmaker Brendan Hall (US), photographer Karim Illia (UK), photographic artist Rhiannon Adam (Ireland), former photographer and YouTuber Tim Dodd (US), and multidisciplinary creative Yemi Dele Akinemi (Czech Republic).
There are two female performers as part of the back-up crew – snowboarder and Olympic gold medalist Caitlin Farrington (US) and dancer Miyu (Japan).
Maezawa bought all available seats on the mission from SpaceX in 2018 and announced in a tweet in 2021 that he would choose eight crew members. He posted a tweet asking the public to apply to fly with him.
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mission profile
The rocket that carried the crew was reportedly a starship (also previously known as the Falcon Heavy and the Big Falcon rocket) which has yet to fly. The trip reportedly cost $5 billion, and Maezawa has already earned a significant advanced payment For SpaceX in 2018.
No details have been given about the kind of training the crew will undergo or the kind of art that actors like Joshi will create during the week-long flight. in his VideoMaezawa said that the two major criteria would be that the artists help other people and society in some way with their flight, and also help other people to fly with them.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said people will “go farther from planet Earth than any human has ever been” in a March 3, 2021 video. “I’m pretty confident that we will have reached orbit multiple times with Starship before 2023,” he added.
Starship is a fully reusable, super-heavy launch vehicle and has not yet reached orbit in tests. After several name changes through iterations — Mars Colonial Transporter, Interplanetary Transport System, Big Falcon Rocket, and then Starship (second stage) and Super Heavy (booster stage) — the Starship system has yet to fly humans.
The rocket’s upper stage was designated with the SN (serial number) prefix for the prototype. Of the 25 prototypes currently built and tested, 8 exploded during testing, 13 were scrapped and 3 were retired. Some flew up to 10 km in tests. SN24 and 25 are currently ready to fly.
There are orbital launches planned for Ship 20-24.
Starship will also make another commercial space flight around the Moon with an American entrepreneur and his wife, Denise and Akiko Tito.
US space agency NASA in 2021 announced That Starship will carry the first lander to the Moon for its Artemis program in 2025.
Who is Mezwa?
Maezawa is a fashion tycoon and the founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing retailer. He is also an art lover and the founder of the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation in 2012.
Announcing his intention to fly at a 2018 event, he Told: “What if Picasso had walked on the moon? Or Andy Warhol, or Michael Jackson, or John Lennon? What about Coco Chanel? These are all actors that I admire.”
He went to the International Space Station in December 2021 With his assistant Yozo Hirano, via a Soyuz craft, and spent 12 days in space as a civilian.
Maizawa is fond of theatrics. In January 2019, he announced on Twitter that he would offer 100 million yen (roughly Rs. 6 crores) to 100 randomly selected people who retweet the tweet and follow him. The tweet was retweeted over 4 million times – the most retweets for any tweet – and his follower count grew by a similar amount.
He repeated the same tweet later that year in December, offer 1 billion yen to 1,000 random people who retweeted and followed him. This tweet became the second most retweeted tweet. The purported reason for giving followers their money was to see if the money made them happy.
It is unclear whether anyone received the money, and no follow-up details about the experiment were released.
Maizawa is currently the most followed account on Twitter from Japan.
In January 2020, Mezawa announced on Twitter that he was looking for a new romantic female partner, saying “[WANTED], Why not the ‘first woman’ to go to the moon? #MZ_looking_for_love”, alongside an image of her and Moon, captioned ‘Come to the moon with me?’
The then-44-year-old billionaire and his new astronaut “girlfriend”, aged 20 or so, were to be filmed on the Moon for a documentary to be broadcast on the streaming service AbemaTV before Maezawa. Cancelled show after criticism
There has never been a female astronaut on or near the Moon.
Maezawa attracted global attention in 2016 by purchasing works of art for over $300 million at auction.
A few years ago, his company Zozo released the Zozosuit, a black bodysuit covered with white dots to take custom measurements of a person’s body for better-fitting clothing. The dots were meant to help create a 3D model of the wearer’s body via Zozo’s iPhone app. However, the customer complained The suit did not perform as promised, with technical glitches and low sales.
estimated to be a billionaire net worth of $1.7 billion, and is currently 20th richest Person in Japan.
(Editing by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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