Cape Canaveral, Florida – The world’s first space tourist wants to return—only this time, sign up for a lunar tour aboard the Elon Musk spacecraft.
For Dennis Tito, 82, it’s a chance to relive the fun of his trip to the International Space Station, now retired with time in his hands. He’s not interested in jumping on a 10-minute trip to the edge of space or repeating what he did 21 years ago. “I went there and did it.”
His week-long lunar shot will bring him—and will determine its date and years in the future—about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the far side of the moon. He will have company: his wife, Akiko, and 10 others willing to pay big bucks for the ride.
Tito will not say how much he pays; His trip to the Russian station cost $20 million.
The pair realize that there is still plenty of testing and development ahead for the Starship, a shiny, bullet-shaped giant that has yet to try to reach space.
“We’ll have to keep ourselves healthy for many years as it will take SpaceX to complete this car,” Tito said in an interview this week with The Associated Press. “I might be sitting in a rocking chair, and not doing any good exercise, if it weren’t for this job.”
Tito is actually the second billionaire to book a spacecraft for a trip around the moon. Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa announced in 2018 that he would buy an entire flight so he could take eight or so others with him, preferably artists. The two men flew to the space station, from Kazakhstan on Russian rockets, a difference of 20 years.
Tito began space tourism in 2001, becoming the first person to push his way into space and antagonizing NASA in the process. The US space agency doesn’t want the viewer to hang around while the station is being built. But the Russian space agency needed the money, and with the help of US-based Space Adventures, it launched a string of wealthy clients to the station during the 2000s, and just a year earlier, it launched Maezawa.
Wealthy clients sample shorter space tastes with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic expects to pay passengers next year.
The Starship has yet to launch atop a Super Heavy booster from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. At 394 feet (120 meters) and 17 million pounds (7.7 million kilograms) of thrust, it is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. NASA has already contracted the spacecraft to land its astronauts on the moon in 2025 or so, in the first moon landing since Apollo.
Tito said the couple’s contract with SpaceX, signed in August 2021, includes an option for a flight within five years from now. Tito will be 87 by then and wants out in case his health falters.
“But if I stay healthy, I’ll wait 10 years,” he said.
Tito’s wife, 57, said she didn’t need convincing. Los Angeles residents are pilots and understand the risks. They share Musk’s vision of a future in space and believe that a couple who fly together to the moon will inspire others to do the same.
Tito, who sold his investment company Wilshire Associates nearly two years ago, said he doesn’t feel guilty about profligate spaceflight for spending money here on Earth.
“We’re retired and now it’s time to reap the rewards of all that hard work,” he said.
Tito predicts that he will also shatter preconceptions about age, as did the space shuttle flight John Glenn in 1998. The first American to orbit Earth still holds the record as the oldest person in orbit.
“He was only 77 years old. He was just a young man,” Tito said. “I might end up being ten years older than him.”
Copyright © 2022 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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