After fulfilling his wish of going to space by staying on the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2021, Maezawa then dreamt of opening up the opportunity of going to space. He called out on his official website dearMoon for crew members to join him on the moon.
He received around a million applications from around the world. The eight crew members and two backup crew from diverse background will accompany Maezawa and fly around the moon for about 7 days before returning back to earth.
The profiles and videos of the 8 members and 2 backup members who passed the selections, interviews and medical checks have not been released. These members are:
• Rhiannin Adam from Ireland
• Steve Aoki from the USA
• Yeme AD from Czech Republic
• Tim Dodd from USA
• Brendan Hall from USA
• Karim from UK
• Choi Seung Hyun from South Korea
• Dev D Joshi from India
The backup team is Kaitlyn Farrington from USA and Miyu from Japan.
The crew members were selected after Yusaku Maezawa had spoken to each one of them and found out about their childhood and dreams of going into space and the challenges they expected to undertake.
Elon Musk is the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX and oversees the development and manufacturing of world’s most advanced rockets and spacecrafts for various missions. Maezawa will now fly to the moon with the selected crew members on a rocket being developed by SpaceX.
Yusaka Maezawa was born in China prefecture Japan in 1975 and founded the company Star Today Ltd. He also launched online fashion mall ZOZO Town. He stepped down as the CEO. He then started other businesses of his own in 2021. He became the first Japanese civilian to visit the ISS.
