Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX said on Wednesday that the world’s first space tourists, Dennis Tito and his wife, Akiko, have signed up to fly around the moon on the space exploration firm’s Starship rocket.
An engineer turned financial analyst, Tito, 82, was the first private person to pay for space travel on Russia’s Soyuz TM-32 mission in 2001, when he spent about eight days aboard the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s nearly week-long flight will see the rocket travel within 200 kilometers of the moon without landing on the surface.
Tito and his wife are the first crew members announced for Starship’s second commercial spaceflight around the Moon.
SpaceX has not announced a launch date for the Starship, which is central to Tesla CEO Musk’s desire to take humans and equipment to the moon and Mars. However, the world’s richest man has said he wants to send a rocket into orbit for the first time as early as next month.
A handful of companies, including SpaceX and Richard Branson-based Virgin Galactic, are trying to make space travel a reality, while Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin currently offers suborbital joyrides that reach an altitude of about 350,000 feet (106 km). .
