Play among the stars
SpaceX says it has customer to fly around moon
Fly me to the moon, Elon! SpaceX —the startup founded by Tesla’s eccentric boss Elon Musk — has announced that it has signed up its first paying passenger to strap into its future Big Falcon Rocket for a trip around the moon.
The galactic tourist’s identity is unknown, but SpaceX said in a tweet late Thursday that it will be revealed on Monday at an event at its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.
SpaceX didn’t release any details around the timing, even as experts note the upcoming Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, is likely at least a year away from an initial test flight, much less a manned trip around the moon.
As such, Musk is already about to blow a deadline for the mission. In February 2017, SpaceX said that it had en- listed two passengers to circle the moon aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket by the end of 2018.
SpaceX didn’t mention what happened to that plan this week. But it called the latest commercial booking “an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.”
That’s despite the fact that the price tag for the trip, which wasn’t disclosed, will likely surge to levels that are beyond stratospheric.
SpaceX said its customer will explain his or her motivation to embark on the 500,000-plus-mile voyage. The normally big-mouthed Musk was tight-lipped on Twitter about the mission, posting only a lone Japanese flag emoji in response to a question about who the aspiring astronaut might be.
The BFR — which is being designed to make trips to Mars — is scheduled to begin testing in March. Musk has previously forecast that the BFR will make its first trip to the Red Planet in 2022.
Customers may soon have even more options to get to space, with billionaire playboy Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic recently completing its first test of a suborbital flight.
Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry up to six passengers and two pilots into space to experience weightlessness for five minutes, with each ticket ringing up at $250,000.
Zero-G, a company that flies aircraft in parabolic arcs to simulate zero gravity, charges just $5,000 a seat.