The Japanese billionaire who commissioned SpaceX for a private mission around the moon on a Starship rocket has abruptly canceled the project, citing continued uncertainty about when the launch vehicle will be ready to fly.
“I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon would be launched by the end of 2023,” Yusaku Maezawa, the project’s backer, told X. “It’s a development project so it is as it is, but it’s still uncertain when the Starship can launch.”
The DearMoon mission was first announced in 2018 — back when the Starship was known as the Big Falcon Rocket — and was set to be the first Starship launch to fly humans around the Moon and back. At the time, the two sides said they were targeting as early as 2023 for the 240,000-mile journey.
Maezawa announced the eight people who will accompany him on the mission in late 2022, with the crew including Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut, South Korean idol TOP and music producer Steve Aoki. At that point, the publicly stated schedule on dearMoon’s website still held to the 2023 timeline; but four years after the project was announced, it was becoming abundantly clear that the target launch date was impossible, given that Starship had not yet completed a single orbital test flight. The project was postponed indefinitely last November.
The cancellation appears to have come as a surprise to at least some of the crew members. “Had I known this could be over within a year and a half of going public, I never would have agreed to it,” Dodd said. “We had no prior knowledge of this possibility. I expressed my thoughts, even before the announcement, that it was impossible for DearMoon to happen in the next few years.”
Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam, also selected for the mission, was more emphatic: “As someone with a critical mind, a lot of this doesn’t make sense, especially in relation to the timeline. I never believed that we will go to 2023 or 2024,” she said.
Reporting at the time suggested that SpaceX was pursuing space tourism as a way to finance the development of the massive, extremely complex rocket. While neither SpaceX nor Maezawa have ever disclosed the potentially significant down payment for the flight, Musk said during an event announcing the mission that it was “a non-trivial amount that will have a material impact” on development costs. the rocket.
But SpaceX’s business has changed significantly since 2018: since that point, the company has achieved a number of impressive milestones, including the certification and flight of its Dragon spacecraft with a crew for astronauts, bringing its constellation of Starlink satellite Internet and increasing the cadence of Falcon rocket launches to nearly 100 per year by 2023. (The company is on track to beat its record this year.)
The company also scored a landmark contract from NASA to use a version of Starship as a lunar lander for the agency’s Artemis program, and that undoubtedly shifted SpaceX’s priorities significantly moving forward. Space tourism had to take a back seat to the interests of their single largest customer.
SpaceX’s valuation has risen steadily, and investor appetite for SpaceX stock seems almost insatiable. At the end of 2018, the company was valued at $30.5 billion; as of last month, it was said to be considering a tender offer that could value the company at around $200 billion. Meanwhile, space research and news organization Payload Research estimated that SpaceX is likely to double its revenue in 2023 from last year to $8.7 billion.
It seems Maezawa’s fortunes have changed as well. According to Forbes, his net worth is now $1.4 billion, which is only half of what it was when dearMoon was announced. Maezawa also scratched his space itch in 2021, when he flew in a Russian Soyuz capsule on a 12-day trip to the International Space Station with private space flight company Space Adventures.