Here’s what we know for sure about the two mysterious people who have reportedly signed up to ride a SpaceX spaceship around the moon:
One, they’re very wealthy.
And two, they are “nobody from Hollywood,” as SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk put it when the moon trip was announced on Monday. SpaceX said the flight would happen next year. If the company actually pulls it off it would mark the first time since NASA’s Apollo era nearly 50 years ago that such a feat has been attempted.
Not much else is known about the project at this point, least of all who the two rich, not-from-Hollywood civilians might be. The company is not saying how much a ticket would cost or precisely what kind of screening and training the two people would have to go through, though we can assume it would be rigorous.
Musk did say that the two people know each other and came to SpaceX with the proposal that they be rocketed in the direction of the Moon. And he said the pair had posted a “significant” deposit and are “very serious” about taking the trip which would travel 240,000 miles each way, though he said he did not have permission to identify them or to say if they were men or women or even pilots.
“I think they are entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here,” Musk told reporters in a telephone conference. “They’re certainly not naive, and we’ll do everything we can to minimize that risk, but it’s not zero. But they’re coming into this with their eyes open.”
So let’s take a few wild guesses about whom they might be, shall we?
- Robert Bigelow: As the deep-pocketed owner of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, he is well-known in rich-guys-who-love-space-travel circles as someone longing to launch himself into the stars. He has said he’s harbored dreams of space travel since he was 12, and his Bigelow Aerospace firm has been working on ways to make space more hospitable for human visitors.
- Naveen Jain: This billionaire entrepreneur co-founded Moon Express as a way to help U.S. companies get their space-exploration act together and start making money from, well, from rare rocks and minerals on the Moon. Makes sense that Jain might be willing to cough up some of his own money to get a closer look at the place he’s hoping to help others exploit.
- Yuri Milner: Heck, he was named after the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, so he’s got the space-travel dream practically woven into his DNA. He also has enough money to have been one of the two people who approached Musk with this crazy Moon-shot idea: the Russian entrepreneur in 2015 invested $100 million for research into how tiny robots might be flung toward the stars by using lasers. Paying to have himself similarly flung up there is not such a far-fetched idea.
- Sir Richard Branson: While his own Virgin Galactic space venture has suffered some early defeats, this billionaire’s love of space travel remains legendary. With hundreds of people already signed up for his $250,000 62-mile-high blast above the Earth, Branson has said he has every intention of being on that first flight, along with his kids. So the Musk Moon trip might be hard for Branson to pass up.
- Elon Musk himself: The guy’s obviously obsessed with space travel, is definitely not from Hollywood and certainly has enough money for a ticket, given his reported net worth of $13.2 billion. Then again, he’s got his hands full these days running Tesla, so he’s a long shot for this long shot into space.
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