Orlando, Fla. – A Japanese billionaire who was the first commercial customer of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle has abruptly backed out of his proposed quixotic lunar mission.
In an announcement on June 1, Yusaku Maezawa announced that he was canceling his “dearMoon” mission, which was to fly him and eight artists around the moon in a Starship vehicle. He pointed to continued delays to the mission and the uncertainty of when it would begin.
“Arrangements have been made with SpaceX to target the launch to late 2023,” the dearMoon project said in a statement posted on its website. “Unfortunately, however, a 2023 launch has become unfeasible, and with no clearly defined timetable in the near future, it is with a heavy heart that Maezawa has made the inevitable decision to cancel the project.”
“I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon will launch by the end of 2023,” Maezawa published on social networks on June 1. “I can’t plan my future in this situation and I feel terrible making crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this time.”
Maezawa was the first customer SpaceX announced for Starship at an event in September 2018 at SpaceX headquarters when the vehicle was still known as the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket. Maezawa made a down payment of an undisclosed amount that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called a “non-trivial amount” and one that would have a “significant impact on the BFR program.”
At the time, the goal was to complete the mission by 2023, but even then, Musk warned that that timeline might not be achievable. “You have to set some date that is the date when things go right,” he said at the time. “Of course we have reality, and things don’t go right in reality.”
Starship has yet to fly to the moon, carry humans, or even reach orbit. SpaceX is preparing for a fourth integrated Starship/Super Heavy test flight, now scheduled for no earlier than June 6, which will fly the vehicle on a suborbital trajectory with the primary goal of demonstrating that both the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage of the Starship can return to the surface without first disintegrating.
SpaceX is increasingly focused on getting Starship to fly so it can perform a manned lunar landing for NASA under a Human Landing System contract awarded in 2021. The company is also working to increase Starship’s flight speed , to support Starlink satellite launches.
However, Maezawa was also slow in choosing the people to accompany him. It wasn’t until December 2022 that dearMoon publicly revealed the eight people who would fly with Maezawa on the mission, along with two alternates. However, it was clear at the time that Starship would not be ready to fly the mission until 2023 or potentially several years later, and the project did not provide a timetable for the mission when it announced the crew.
Some of the people chosen for dearMoon spoke out on social media after Maezawa announced the cancellation. “We had no prior information about this possibility,” said Tim Dodd, YouTube personality known as “Everyday Astronaut”. “I expressed my opinion, even before the announcement, that dearMoon was unlikely to happen in the next few years.”
He added that he was “extremely disappointed” by the decision. “I slowly allowed myself to imagine a trip to the moon bit by bit.”
“We were dropped, apparently due to impatience,” said Rhiannon Adam, an Irish photographer who was the only woman on dearMoon’s core team, offered a sharper critique of Maezawa’s decision. “As someone with a critical mind, a lot of it doesn’t make sense, especially in terms of the timeline. I never believed we would go in 2023 or 2024.
She said that she and others selected for dearMoon were willing to wait, but were not consulted by Maezawa before he announced the cancellation. “I’m left questioning the integrity of the project and feeling taken advantage of.”
Maezawa managed to go into space, but not with SpaceX. In December 2021, he and his assistant Yozo Hirano flew a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, spending a week and a half in space before returning. This mission was organized by Space Adventures, a space tourism company.
There’s another commercial Starship lunar mission in the books: In October 2022, Dennis Tito, the first commercial space tourist to visit the ISS in 2001, announced that he and his wife will fly a Starship mission around the moon along with up to 10 others souls. Neither he nor SpaceX announced a date for the mission at the time or provided updates on its status since then.
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