IS CALLED Yusaku Maezawa, founded the clothing site Zozotown and booked all seats aboard a mission, departing in 2023, on the giant rocket ship Starship. If the company has been talking about it for three years, the tycoon – who has a net worth of about 2 billion dollars – has suddenly changed the cards on the table of the SpaceX adventure: if first the eight seats available on the spaceship had to be reserved for an unspecified selection of artists (a painter, a musician, a director, a fashion designer and so on) now the opportunity opens up to anyone. The owner of the main Japanese clothing site has in fact just published a series of updates on his Twitter profile and on the site dedicated to the initiative, dearmoon.earth, explaining that he had decided to change his path because he realized that “every person who makes something creative can be defined as an artist “.
Space X takes two US astronauts into space. The new frontier of private industry
by ANNA LOMBARDI
Thus, the singular crew of civilians who will have to face a one-week journey for 390,000 kilometers will have to be composed through a series of passages. The first is already active and will close on March 14th. The very first skimming will be very fast, to be completed within a week. Then we will move on to other steps, even if it has not been clarified which and according to which deadlines. In any case, the procedure should cross the finish line by next May, the month for which final interviews and medical checks are scheduled for the eight “citizens of the world” selected. Abnormal rhythms for such a mission, virtually scheduled for 2023 but still to be confirmed, given that the Starship itself has never made a complete flight and is still being tested. On the contrary: the first launch, last December from the Boca Chica complex in southern Texas, ended with a bang (but they still got a lot of useful information on the development from SpaceX).
America is back to running for space. With private individuals, towards the Moon and Mars
by MATTEO MARINI
“I am confident that before 2023 we will have arrived in orbit many times with Starship and that we will be able to safely transport a human crew – explains Musk in a video of just over six minutes – it is all very promising”. If he gets off the ground, the mission of “Commander Maezawa” (who a couple of years ago sold his Zozo platform to Yahoo! Japan and made people talk because he was looking for a companion to accompany him on the journey) will make history again, as it happened in many cases with the innovations and challenges launched by SpaceX: it would in fact be the first private flight beyond Earth’s orbit. It will not land but will limit itself, so to speak, to orbit our satellite. “We expect that the people on board will go farther than any human has ever gone from planet Earth” added the volcanic entrepreneur, founder of PayPal, Tesla and Neuralink, among other hi-tech companies that between reality and some fantasy too many are pushing the limits of what is possible.
To usher in the era of space tourism, however, we won’t have to wait until 2023 and the complex enterprise of the wealthy Japanese entrepreneur. Already at the end of the year, or more likely the next, the first orbiting flight in history with civilians on board will start: they will take off thanks to the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule, the one currently docked on the ISS and which has successfully transported the crew of the Crew-1 mission, and will have to bring him back to Earth. Powered by a Falcon 9 rocket – all also signed by SpaceX – at the end of the year Inspiration4 is expected to lift off the Launch Complex 39 A of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. Virgin Galactic’s projects will thus burn over time Richard Branson, which has just postponed further test flights of the SpaceShipTwo maxi-plane and the Unity shuttle by a few months.
Also in this case, the mission will not be led by an expert astronaut but a billionaire enriched with digital: it is the 38-year-old Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of the Shift4Payments platform. He, too, an experienced military jet pilot, bought the entire operation for about $ 20 million per seat and will distribute the three remaining seats in the context of a gigantic charity initiative in favor of a hospital in Memphis, St. Jude Children’s Research. Hospital, known internationally for research on serious pediatric diseases. The entrepreneur and philanthropist has already donated one hundred million dollars and among the fundraising (among the benefactors a crew member will be drawn) and other founds he hopes to bring the contribution to two hundred million. The first member of the quartet was announced a few days ago: it’s called Hayley Arceneaux, 29, is a medical assistant at St. Jude, where even as a child she was treated for bone cancer, and will be the youngest American, as well as the first with a prosthesis, to travel to space.
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