Behind the Demise of a Quirky Billionaire’s SpaceX Moon Mission
A wood-paneled space capsule. Flashy spacesuits. The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa wanted some unusual touches for his $500 million trip around the moon on a SpaceX rocket. But Elon Musk’s space company had other priorities.
Yusaku Maezawa had just a few requests for SpaceX.
In 2018, the Japanese e-commerce billionaire had agreed to pay SpaceX to fly himself and a crew of eight artists around the moon for a first-of-its-kind project called dearMoon. As part of the deal, Maezawa asked SpaceX to customize the interior of the crew capsule of Starship, the 400-foot-tall rocket that would take the group to space.
Mockups of the design drew on Japanese and Nordic inspirations, with wood paneling throughout the space and bathrooms that resembled a Swedish sauna, according to people close to the project. Because the artists would be recording music and videos throughout their trip, Maezawa asked SpaceX to pay special attention to the acoustics of the space, some of those people said.