Billionaire Dennis Tito has bought two tickets to travel to the Moon. If in 2001 he became the first space tourist in the world to travel on a Souz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), now, he wants to go with his wife Akiko (57 years old) on a private trip to the Moon with Elon Musk’s ship, Starship.
Tito, along with his wife Akiko, will experience a week-long trip to the Moon that will take the couple 200 kilometers to the other side of the Moon; the amount paid for the tickets has not been disclosed.
An aeronautical and astronautical engineer by training, Tito worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s, before founding the investment management firm Wilshire Associates in 1972.
The pair signed a contract with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in August 2021 that includes the option of a flight within five years because there is still so much testing and development ahead of Starship that it has yet to fly into space or even orbit.
Those missions will be a precursor to Starship’s eventual manned missions to Mars, which will be funded in part by SpaceX’s space tourism launches and its Starlink Internet service.
The first manned Starship mission will be Polaris III, chartered by billionaire Jared Isaacman , which will likely fly into low Earth orbit.
12 people will travel on the second of SpaceX’s planned lunar flights for later this decade. Both will follow a similar trajectory to NASA’s Artemis I and Artemis II missions, which will fly around the Moon but not land on the lunar surface.
Starship is nearing its first orbital flight and this is just the beginning before taking humans into space.
Reference: SpaceX
