TOKYO (Reuters) -Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has canceled its “dearMoon” mission, which the project said would have been the first private flight around the moon, the mission announced Saturday.
The team originally aimed to complete the flight around the moon late last year with celebrities on board, but that became “unfeasible,” the mission said in a statement on its website.
“Without clear near-term planning certainty, it is with a heavy heart that Maezawa has made the inevitable decision to cancel the project,” the report said. “To everyone who supported this project and looked forward to this endeavor, we sincerely appreciate it and apologize for this outcome.”
In a separate post on the mission’s website, Maezawa suggested the cause of the cancellation was uncertainty over project development. He said he signed the contract in 2018 under the assumption that the launch would take place in late 2023.
“It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s still uncertain when Starship can launch,” Maezawa said.
“I cannot plan my future in this situation and I hate that the crew members have to wait longer. Hence the difficult decision to cancel at this time.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX named Maezawa, the colorful founder of Japanese online fashion store Zozo Inc, its first private passenger in 2018.
Three years later, he became the first private passenger in more than a decade to visit the International Space Station, on a Soyuz rocket.
In 2022, Maezawa announced that K-pop star TOP and DJ Steve Aoki would be among the eight crew members he planned to take on the DearMoon mission.
In November he said the flyby mission would be postponed until this year or later.
(Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by William Mallard and Tom Hogue)
