SpaceX Now Booking Second Lunar Flyby Tourist Trip

Relatively unnoticed in the news last week was that SpaceX has begun accepting bids for a second tourist flight around the moon in their Starship.  The company has long had a well-publicized plan to send a space tourist on a lunar orbital mission by 2023.  The tourist is Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa who is planning to take a small crew of artists with him. That "by 2023" estimate is from 2018, so it seems a bit more iffy now as Starship still hasn't achieved orbit and I'd expect them to do a lot of testing before taking people on Starship at all, not to mention taking them on a never-before flown mission, but it still looks like it could happen long before Artemis/SLS will go to the moon. 

There are several interesting aspects of this flight, though.  First off, it's the third completely private space mission of Starship.  The first will be Jared Isaacman's Polaris III mission, the first manned flight of Starship; the second will be Maezawa's flight.  Second off, the first seats were bought by none other than Dennis Tito, the first space tourist who bought a ride to the International Space Station in 2001.  Tito bought tickets for himself and his wife, Akiko Tito. 

Dennis Tito said that after his Soyuz ride to space, he always wanted to go back, but there just wasn't a vehicle he trusted.  I guess that means Soyuz didn't leave a really positive impression. 

That changed about a year and a half ago when he and his wife, Akiko Tito, visited SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. After a tour, they discussed possible space tourism trips, and it did not take long for the lunar idea to come up. Would Tito be interested in riding aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle for a flight around the Moon?

"We looked at each other, and we knew right away," Dennis Tito said this week, during an interview with Ars alongside his wife.

"I said yes, I want to go," Akiko Tito added. "We both wanted to go."

Dennis and Akiko Tito, SpaceX photo.

This flight will be a circumlunar flyby that won't land on the moon, but an experience that only a few people in history have had.  Dennis Tito said he wasn't at liberty to say what this flight will cost them.  There's a report that the Starship to be used will have a dozen seats and they appear to be open to bids.  Naturally, the idea of a married couple flying in space together is novel and is getting some attention, but with a dozen seats, you can be pretty sure it won't just be the two of them.  

The timing of this trip depends on how quickly Starship can get into service.  Musk has made it clear that they're being very cautious in development lately, simply because they've learned that a big RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) could set them back a lot of months.  Today, for example, they destacked ship 24 from booster 7 and I can find no published reason for it.

The timeline for all of these missions hinges on the development of the Starship vehicle, which may make a debut orbital test flight in the coming months from South Texas. After that, the large, fully reusable launch system will fly dozens of uncrewed missions, mostly carrying Starlink payloads, before humans climb on board. This is because Starship will make a propulsive landing back on Earth—something no crew vehicle has ever done—and has no backup should there be some sort of landing failure. 

Dennis Tito realizes he's going to have to wait, and that's complicated by the fact that he just turned 82.  He and Akiko have both been given flight-level physicals and passed with no issues, but the longer Starship takes to get to this point, the riskier it gets.  I'm guessing most of us have some experiences with age not being kind to us.  The oldest (former) astronaut to spend time on orbit was John Glenn, who took a nine day flight on a Space Shuttle in 1998 at age 77.  If you include suborbital flights, then William Shatner's ride on Blue Origin's New Shepard at age 90 last October is the high bar.