Sitting in the California headquarters of SpaceX 14 months ago, the financier and space tourist Dennis Tito was asked whether he would like to make another trip to the International Space Station, aboard one of the company’s rockets.
“I said: ‘No, I’m not interested in that,’” Tito recalled. “But I am interested in going to the moon.” Then he looked at his wife, Akiko, sitting beside him. “I nodded,” he said. “She nodded.”
Many husbands have promised their wife the moon. But Tito, 82, who became the world’s first space tourist by paying $20 million for a 2001 Russian flight to the space station, now expects to be as good as his word, having reached a deal with SpaceX that will carry them both around
