Two wealthy wannabe space tourists have signed up to travel around the moon in 2018. The word is they have paid substantial deposits to space travel company SpaceX to secure their passage, and if the mission is successful, they will be the first people to travel deep into space for four decades.
The journey will start at the Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad 39A near Cape Canaveral, Florida – the same launch pad used by the Apollo program for its lunar missions. The duo will spend a week cruising through space inside one of SpaceX’s automated Dragon capsules launched on its Falcon Heavy rocket. The passengers will fly past the surface of the moon, without landing.
Elon Musk founder and CEO of SpaceX said:
Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration.
The company hasn’t revealed who the two space tourists are but did say they are not from Hollywood and that they know each other.
Not the first time
This isn’t the first time space tourists have gone where no man has gone before. Seven of them shelled out tens of millions of dollars for a trip on Russian Soyuz rockets to travel 200 miles above Earth’s surface to visit the International Space Station.
The moon is around a quarter of a million miles away and the capsule will be following a trajectory of 300,000 to 400,000 from Earth.
When asked how much the trip will cost, Mr Musk said: “A little bit more than the cost of a crewed mission to the space station would be.”
Their Star Trek-like mission as stated on their website is:
The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.