Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has finally announced the names of artists joining him on SpaceX’s first mission to the Moon. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Maezawa announced the dearMoon mission after the Japanese entrepreneur visited the SpaceX HQ in September 2018.
Yusaku has selected 10 artists from around the world who had applied for the opportunity to be part of the first civilian lunar orbital mission. Of these 10 crew members, 2 positions are for the backup crew, just in case.
It took a year and a half for Maezawa and his team to make these selections. “I also had deep conversations with each candidate, asking them about their childhood, why they are dreaming about going to space, what kind of challenges they would like to undertake,” Yusaku Maezawa said in a video statement yesterday (auto-translated from Japanese).
Here’s the full list of dearMoon 1st civilian lunar orbital mission crew members:
| Crew Name | Occupation / Art Form | Country |
|---|---|---|
| Yusaku Maezawa | Entrepreneur, Art Collector, Businessman | Japan |
| Steve Aoki | DJ/Producer | USA |
| TOP (Choi Seung Hyun) | Musician | South Korea |
| Yemi A.D. | Multi-disciplinary creative / Choreographer | Czech Republic |
| Rhiannon Adam | Photographic Artist | Ireland |
| Tim Dodd | YouTuber | USA |
| Karim Iliya | Photographer | United Kingdom |
| Brendan Hall | Filmmaker | USA |
| Dev D. Joshi | Actor | India |
| Kaitlyn Farrington (backup crew) | Snowboarder | USA |
| Miyu (backup crew) | Dancer | Japan |
Tim Dodd better known as Everyday Astronaut is the only YouTuber who made it to this coveted list of dearMoon crew members. According to Maezawa, 1 million applications were received from around the world to join this mission.
Tim Dodd has been making space-related YouTube videos for about 6 years now. Tim started his YouTube channel wearing an astronaut suit as a joke but with time and effort, he has amassed a 1.35 million subscriber base. He covers SpaceX and NASA rocket launches and provides live-streaming and commentary of these events through his YouTube channel.
“I am literally going to fly around the Moon, and genuinely, I still can’t believe it,” Tim said in a video he released on his channel announcing his dearMoon crew selection (watch below).
dearMoon is not a Moon landing mission but rather a lunar orbital flight. The crew members will experience a roundtrip around the Moon’s orbit on a specially-designed SpaceX Starship spacecraft.
Last year, SpaceX released a concept render of a Crew Dragon spaceship that showed a glass dome observatory. SpaceX might apply this concept to the Starship dearMoon mission to allow the photographers and filmmakers to fully utilize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
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