Yusaku Maezawa Cancels DearMoon Due to SpaceX Delays

In late 2022, billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced the crew for dearMoon, an initiative that would take a spacecraft full of artists and thinkers into space and around the Moon. And while that might sound like the premise of a science fiction reboot of Gilligan’s Island, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal of the project. Earlier this month, Maezawa provided an update on the project, and it came in the form of bad news: dearMoon was no more.

“It is unfortunate to be announcing that ‘dearMoon’, the first private circum-lunar flight project, will be cancelled,” the initiative’s X/Twitter account declared. “We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project.”

Maezawa provided more details into his decision in a follow-up thread on the same platform. “I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon would launch by the end of 2023. It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch,” he wrote.

“I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time,” he continued. “I apologize to those who were excited for this project to happen.”

In the six years since Maezawa signed the aforementioned contract, things also changed for SpaceX, his partner in the venture. As Steve Dent observed at Engadget, NASA announced in 2021 that it would work with SpaceX on the Artemis project — something that lowered the priority of dearMoon in the company’s hierarchy.

SpaceX’s Second Starship Launch Ends in Self-Destruction

That said, it did reach a much greater height than its predecessor

It’s a shame for the crew who’d planned to head into space with Maezawa, but he’s at least gotten to journey into the cosmos already. In 2021, he spent almost two weeks on the International Space Station; turns out having billions of dollars makes space tourism that much easier.