Billionaire will go to moon

Hawthorne – SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space transportation company, this week named its first private passenger on a voyage around the moon as Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, the founder and chief executive of online fashion retailer Zozo.

A former drummer in a punk band, Maezawa is tentatively planning to make his moon flight in 2023 aboard SpaceX’s forthcoming Big Falcon Rocket spaceship, taking the race to commercialise space travel to new heights.

Only 24 astronauts have flown beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield, in missions spanning a four-year period from December 1968 to December 1972.

Maezawa’s identity was revealed at the company’s headquarters and rocket factory in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne.

Most famous outside Japan for his record-breaking multimillion dollar-purchase of an untitled 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, Maezawa said he would invite six to eight artists to join him on the lunar flyby.

The billionaire chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc, Musk said the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, will shuttle passengers to the moon and eventually fly humans and cargo to Mars. – Reuters