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On Friday night, Project dearMoon — a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other “crew members” on a lunar flight aboard SpaceX’s Starship vehicle — was abruptly canceled.

“It is with regret that I announce that ‘dearMoon,’ the first private lunar mission project, will be canceled,” the mission’s official account on social media site X said. “Thank you to everyone who supported us and we apologize to those , who were looking forward to this project.”

Shortly thereafter, the project’s financial backer and its “crew chief,” Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision to X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023. .

“It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s not yet certain when Starship might launch,” he wrote. “I can’t plan my future in this situation and I feel terrible making the team members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to step down at this time.” I apologize to those who were excited to see this project happen.”

The mission was to be the first human spaceflight of a Starship to launch from Earth, fly around the Moon and return. Now, that doesn’t happen. Why did this happen and what does it mean?

The origin of the mission

Maezawa and Musk made the announcement, side-by-side, at SpaceX’s Hawthorne rocket factory in September 2018. It was kind of a weird but important moment. It seemed significant that SpaceX was signing its first commercial contract for the massive Starship rocket. And while the value was not disclosed, Maezawa was injecting something in the low hundreds of millions of dollars into the program.

However, Maezawa always seemed a little frivolous. He said he would hold a competition to fill 10 other seats in the vehicle. “I didn’t want to have such a fantastic experience alone,” he said. “I’d be a little lonely.” Later, he chooses a team of creative people.

At first, however, Maezawa took the project seriously. When I watched the first Starship jump test in July 2019, there were only a handful of visitors to see the Starhopper’s short flight. One of them was a Maezawa representative who had been closely monitoring the progress of the Starship.

As great space projects do – and to no one’s surprise – Starship fell behind in development. The first test flight didn’t take place until April 2023, and that was just the beginning. The dearMoon mission was at the very end of a long series of tests that the vehicle must complete: safe launch, controlled space flight, safe landing on the Starship upper stage, space refueling, space habitability and more.

With the fourth Starship test flight coming in a few days, as early as June 5, SpaceX has so far demonstrated the ability to safely launch the Starship. So it remains at the beginning of a challenging technical journey.

Turning point

One of the biggest impacts on the dearMoon project came in April 2021 when NASA selected the Starship vehicle as the lunar lander for its Artemis program. This put the large vehicle on the critical path for NASA’s ambitious program to land humans on the lunar surface. He also offered an order of magnitude more funding, $2.9 billion, and a promise of more if SpaceX could deliver a vehicle to take humans to the surface of the moon from lunar orbit and back.

Since then, SpaceX has had two clear priorities for its Starship program. The first of these is to become operational and begin the deployment of larger Starlink satellites. And the second is to use these flights to test technologies needed for NASA’s Artemis program, such as propellant storage in space and refueling.

As a result, other aspects of the program, including dearMoon, were deprioritized. In recent months, it has become clear that if Maezawa’s mission does happen, it won’t happen until at least the early 2030s — at least a decade after the original plan.

Change of destiny

Meanwhile, Maezawa’s priorities may have also changed. According to Forbes, when the plan was announced in 2018, the entrepreneur had a net worth of about $3 billion. Today it is valued at only half that. He also scratched his itch to go into space in 2021, flying aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle for a 12-day trip to the International Space Station.

The writing has been on the wall for Maezawa for a while since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur at X earlier this year. (It’s a sure sign of his displeasure. Musk unfollowed me twice on Twitter/X after stories or interactions he didn’t like.) It’s likely that a combination of development delays and Maezawa’s personal wealth caused the parties to drop the project.

All of this leaves a clearer path ahead for Starship: Get operational, start flying Starlink satellites, and start overcoming technical challenges for Artemis. Then, in a few years, the company will turn its attention to the challenging prospect of launching humans in Starships from Earth and then landing them back on the planet. The first of those people will be another billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has already flown a Crew Dragon and plans at least two more such flights before the pioneering Starship mission.