dearMoon benefactor shares delay to its Starship mission (which we all saw coming)

Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese entrepreneur, shared on his Instagram account an update to his dearMoon mission around the Moon. Shocking no one, the flight will not take place this year as the rocket is still very much in development.

dearMoon no longer has an expected launch date

The dearMoon mission was formally announced in 2018 and would fly a group of artist around the Moon on SpaceX‘s Starship rocket. Being paid for by Japanese entrepreneur and art collector, Yusaku Maezawa or MZ, after not being able to fly around the Moon in a Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon Heavy.

The flight was slated to take place in 2023, with MZ choosing a crew of artist and other creatives that wouldn’t normally have a chance to go to space. Crew submissions began in 2021 and in December 2022 MZ announced the eight crew members that would join him on a week long lunar trip.

dearMoon stated that crew training would begin shortly for a flight and per updates occasionally from MZ and other crew members, training seems to have already begun.

However, 2023 was a rather ambitious timeline for SpaceX to meet. The rocket has only launched once which did not make it pass stage separation. Even if SpaceX could have stuck to the schedule of launch every few months starting last year, company officials want a large number of launches before any crew flies on it.

We were planning for our lunar orbital mission “dearMoon” @dearmoonproject to take place in 2023, but seems like it will take a little longer. We’re not sure when the flight will be, but we will give you all an update once we know more.

MZ via his personal instagram @yusaku2020

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell stated that she wanted at least 100 launches before crew would launch on Starship, but that isn’t a hard requirement. Yet it shows how much flight experience they want before they put human lives on the line.

Also, dearMoon will not be the first crewed flight on Starship. That honor has already been reserved for a future Polaris mission, a program ran by tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. So far Polaris hasn’t even given a guess as to when that mission will fly as it will be no earlier than flight number 3 for them, maybe even further down the list.

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When might Starship become ready for dearMoon?

This week SpaceX might just get a chance to fly its Starship rocket for a second time. We are still waiting approvals from both the Fish and Wildlife Service and FAA on if the rocket can launch again.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared Tuesday morning that they expect to get approval before the November 17 launch date. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Starship will launch this week. Any sort of technical problems could push the flight back to next week.

You can vote if you think Starship will fly this week in our weekly poll!

We should know more as the week progresses. SpaceX still needs to restack the Starship vehicle onto of the Super Heavy booster before moving forward. However, flight termination charges were already installed, so it could be a quick stack before flying.