Eight celebrities were chosen to join Eccentric Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has an ambitious plan to fly around the next year moon.
Maezawa announced on Twitter today that he has been joined by an unorthodox crew of US DJ and producer Steve Aoki, US YouTuber Tim Dodd, Czech artist Yemi AD, Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam, British photographer Karim Iliya, US -Filmmaker Brendan Hall, Bollywood star Dev Joshi and K-pop musician TOP of South Korea. US snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington and Japanese dancer Miyu have agreed to be backup crew members.
Maezawa said…
“I hope everyone realizes the responsibility that comes with leaving the earth, going to the moon and back.
“They will benefit greatly from this experience and I hope they will use this to contribute to the planet and to humanity.”
The SpaceX rocket mission, called DearMoon, would take about six days and orbit the moon without landing.
The SpaceX rocket ship passed all of its in-atmosphere test flights and landed successfully, but it has yet to complete an orbital test flight — something founder Elon Musk has promised will happen by the end of this year.
The 47-year-old entrepreneur experienced a space journey when he flew to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket last December and reportedly paid 10 billion yen ($73 million) for the privilege.
Maezawa founded Start Today in 1998 and in 2004 launched online fashion retail site Zozotown, now Japan’s largest. Most recently, in 2018, Maezawa launched a tailored clothing brand, ZOZO, and a home measurement system, ZOZOSUIT. In December 2021, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.0 billion.
Maezawa is the founder of the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation, which he launched in 2012 with the aim of “supporting young artists as a pillar of the next generation of contemporary art”.
He attracted public attention in 2016 for the record purchase of a work of a devil by Jean-Michel Basquiat for US$57.3 and broke the record again in May 2017 with a US$110.5 million auction bid for another Basquiat work, a skull.
In the future, Maezawa plans to open a contemporary art museum in Chiba that will house his collection.
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