The Japanese billionaire who commissioned SpaceX for a private mission around the moon on a Starship rocket has abruptly canceled the project, citing lingering uncertainties about when the launch vehicle will be ready to fly.
“I signed the contract in 2018, thinking that DearMoon would launch at the end of 2023,” Yusaku Maezawa, the project’s financier, said on X. “It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain about when Starship might launch.
The DearMoon mission was first announced in 2018 – when Starship was still known as Big Falcon Rocket – and it would be the first Starship launch to fly humans around the moon and back. At the time, the two sides said they were aiming for the 300,000 kilometer trip as early as 2023.
Maezawa announced the eight people who would join him on the mission in late 2022, including Everyday Astronaut’s Tim Dodd, South Korean idol TOP and music producer Steve Aoki. At the time, the publicly posted schedule on the DearMoon website still stuck to the 2023 timeline; but four years after the project’s announcement, it became very clear that the target launch date was unachievable, as Starship had not even conducted a single orbital test flight at that point. Last November, the project was postponed indefinitely.
The cancellation appears to have come as a surprise to at least some of the crew. “If I had known this could have ended within a year and a half of the public announcement, I would never have agreed to it,” Dodd said. “We were not aware of this possibility in advance. I expressed my opinion, even before the announcement, that DearMoon was unlikely to happen in the next few years.
Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam, also selected for the mission, was more pointed: “As someone with a critical mind, a lot of this doesn’t make sense, especially when it comes to the timeline. “I never believed we would go in 2023 or 2024,” she said.
Reports at the time indicated that SpaceX was pursuing space tourism as a way to finance the development of the massive, hugely complex rocket. Although neither SpaceX nor Maezawa ever disclosed the likely significant down payment amount for the flight, Musk said at an event announcing the mission that it was “a non-trivial amount that will have a material impact” on the rocket’s development costs.
But SpaceX’s business has changed significantly since 2018: Since then, the company has achieved a number of impressive milestones, including certifying and flying its astronaut manned Dragon spacecraft, bringing its Starlink satellite internet constellation online, and increasing the launch frequency of the Falcon rocket to nearly 100 per year by 2023. (The company is on track to beat its own record this year.)
The company also received a landmark contract from NASA to use a version of Starship as a lunar lander for the agency’s Artemis program, and this has undoubtedly shifted SpaceX’s priorities significantly moving forward. Space tourism had to take a back seat to the interests of their largest customer.
SpaceX’s valuation has been steadily rising, and investor interest in SpaceX stock seems nearly insatiable. At the end of 2018, the company was valued at $30.5 billion; As of last month, the company was reportedly considering an offer that could value the company at around $200 billion. Meanwhile, space research and news organization Payload Research estimates that SpaceX will likely double its revenue by 2023 from the previous year to $8.7 billion.
It appears that Maezawa’s fortunes have also shifted. 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 spaceflight company Space Adventures.