WASHINGTON — The first personal astronaut to travel to the International Space Station plans to return to space on a vacation around the moon on the SpaceX spacecraft with his wife and up to 10 other people.
SpaceX announced on Oct. 12 that it had sold tickets to Dennis and Akiko Tito for what will be the time it will crew the Starship project around the moon. The two are the first of 12 other people who will participate in this project, the timing of which is unclear.
The project, as recently designed, is about a spacecraft introduced into low-Earth orbit that would encounter a reservoir, some other spacecraft whose tanks would have been filled with thrusters from other starship launches. Once the starship’s tanks are filled at the lunar destination, it will fire its engines on a circumlunar trajectory, a number 8 that will take it circularly to the moon and less than two hundred kilometers from its surface before returning to Earth. The whole project would take about a week, adding 3 circular days to the moon. .
The flight will be a return to the area for 82-year-old Dennis Tito, who flew on a Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS in April 2001 as the first personal astronaut to climb the station and the first to pay for his own area. He spent 8 days in the area before returning to Earth aboard some other Soyuz.
In the years following the flight, Tito said he had no interest in returning to space, but a call with reporters explained that this had replaced him while he followed SpaceX’s progress. “Over time, seeing SpaceX’s breakthroughs and what they were doing fascinated me. He said.
The first talks with SpaceX about a flight took place just over a year ago, he said. At the time, he recalled that corporate officials had asked him if he was interested in returning to space, and said he was not interested in a return to the ISS or some other orbital flight. “But I’d be interested in going to the moon,” he said. And then I looked at Akiko, and we had a little eye contact, and she said, ‘yes, me too. “And that’s how it all started. “
Akiko Tito, an engineer, pilot and real estate investor, said the flight was in response to an interest in the area dating back to her childhood. “This project is the first in a long series that will help humanity become multiplanetary and I am highly revered. to be a component of it,” the call said.
The project, which has no official name, will be Starship’s circumlunar project of the moment. In 2018, SpaceX announced that it had sold a Starship flight, then known as Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, to Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who planned to fly. himself and an organization of artists around the moon in a “dearMoon” project.
Maezawa presented a festival to the team for this flight in March 2021, with the aim of helping the team during this summer and starting education for a project scheduled for 2023. However, Maezawa has yet to announce the equipment for the flight and the newest thing. The update, more than a year ago, only said that the finalists had passed medical exams. The draft did not respond to a request for comment Oct. 12 on the prestige of the dearMoon project.
There were also some main points about the flight that the Titus will make around the moon. There is no timeline for the project, other than that it will take a position after DearMoon and a flight of the Polaris program, an initiative led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, which will be the first Starship flight as a team. Aarti Matthews, team manager for Starship and shipping systems at SpaceX, said the company doesn’t yet know if the project will be presented from its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas, or from Kennedy Space Center. in Florida.
Dennis Tito declined to say how much he and his wife paid for the flight. There will be two to 12 more people on the flight, with SpaceX actively competing to sell the other seats. “We have a lot of interest in the other mission headquarters. We communicate with many other customers,” Matthews said.
Starship has yet to make its first orbital release attempt, though Starbase crews are lately installing a Starship vehicle and its Super Heavy booster to test ahead of an imaginable orbital release attempt in the coming months. By contrast, when Dennis Tito flew on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2001, the vehicle had been in service for over 3 decades and had flown on several dozen manned missions.
Tito said he was not involved in Starship’s lack of existing flight legacy, predicting that Starship will launch “hundreds” of times before its flight. “This is not going to happen anytime soon,” he said of his mission. Many robberies, many tests. I think, in fact, the vehicle will be more tested when we fly than even the Soyuz when I flew 21 years ago.
“We are confident that we will have this vehicle fully tested and fit to pass the time we carry out this mission,” Matthews said.
Preparations for Titos’ flight and the latest dearMoon project are separate from SpaceX’s work on a lunar landing edition of Starship that the company is preparing for NASA’s Human Landing System program. “The profile of the project is different, so we expect those two flights to be independent of each other,” Matthews said.
Dennis Tito added that he is not interested in landing on the moon and will most likely retire from spaceflight after a trip around the moon. “I can say unequivocally that we are not going to land on the moon. It’s an absolutely different mission,” he said.
He added that he would be willing to orbit the moon rather than revolve around it as recently planned. “That would be an illusion, but if it happened, I’m not going to complain. “