A golden ticket to the moon
A private trip around the moon “sounds magical, and also pretty far-fetched,” said Kaitlyn Tiffany in Vox.com. But that’s what Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought from Elon Musk’s space travel company, SpaceX, this week—and Maezawa says he will take up to eight artists along with him for the epic ride. If all goes as planned, the mission, called Dear Moon, will blast off in 2023 and take one week to loop around Earth’s satellite. That “if” is a big one. The 100-seat space vehicle Maezawa is supposed to travel on, the Big Falcon Rocket, hasn’t been built yet, and Musk estimates it will cost $5 billion. There’s no guide on how to prepare a bunch of tourists for the rigors of space travel. And so far, “for all its buzz,” SpaceX “has not actually sent anyone into space yet—professional astronaut or otherwise.”
Sure, it might not work, but boy will the flight be significant if it gets off the ground, said Joelle Renstrom in The Washington Post. Choosing Maezawa for the moon voyage could seem to “perpetuate the idea that space is a playground only for rich nonastronauts.” Bringing artists to space, however, is a “beautiful idea” and potentially a game changer for all humankind. The trip “could inspire and stoke the curiosity of the human race, urging us to widen our perspectives.” Rich people have gone to space before— seven made journeys on Russian rockets brokered by American company Space Adventures between 2001 and 2009, paying as much as $35 million per trip. However, they didn’t fly nearly as far—and the last moon landing was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. SpaceX and Maezawa might not “democratize” space travel, but through the eyes of the artists, “they could help make space accessible to all of us.” It’s nice to dream, but for the U.S. government, a SpaceX client, space tourism could be a “distraction,” said Joe Pappalardo in Popular Mechanics. SpaceX launches national-security satellites for NASA; the crewed flights it has planned for the government in 2019 are behind schedule. That’s why Musk was careful to say the tourist flights would take up only 5 percent of SpaceX’s effort. Just don’t forget there’s a personal rivalry at stake, too, said Rex Crum in MercuryNews.com. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the founder of space travel company Blue Origin, announced last week that he plans to send his first crewed rocket into space in 2019. The future of exploring the cosmos may now come down to two billionaires “going at each other” in a “rich-guy space race.”