By Naseerah Nanabhai

03:03:2021

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has kicked off a global contest to select eight crew members to join him on a private SpaceX flight around the moon in 2023. This is the first mission of such conducted on a commercial basis.

Maezawa is an online fashion tycoon and in 2018 was announced as the first man to book a spot on board the lunar spaceship, that is being developed by SpaceX. He is believed to have paid an undisclosed sum for the trip expected to launch in 2023.

Two years ago Maezawa announced he’d only ride with a select group of artists on his voyage around the Moon. But on Wednesday in a video posted on his Twitter account, he revealed a broader application process.

“I want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join…it will be 10 to 12 people in all, but I will be inviting 8 people to come along on the ride.” He mentioned in the video.

Maezawa’s announcement does not make mention of how the selected astronauts would train for the mission, but he made it clear the undisclosed ticket price is on him: “I will pay for the entire journey. I have bought all the seats, so it will be a private ride.” He said it will take three days to get to the Moon, where Starship will loop behind it and begin its three-day journey back to Earth.

Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation, fully reusable Mars rocket system designed to ferry humans and up to 100 tons of cargo on future missions into deep space. Only early iterations of the rocket have flown so far, with one of two recent high-altitude tests, both of these tests have ended in fiery explosions during their landing attempts.

Under a rigorous and sometimes bumpy development timeline, Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell have mentioned that Starship’s first orbital flight could come at the end of 2021. Last year, Musk said Starship needs to “do hundreds of missions with satellites before we put people on board,” a feat that calls the 2023 moonshot date into question.