At 82, Dennis Tito remembers very well his first trip to the ISS thanks to a Soyuz capsule flight. He would love to double up, and has finally booked a place on a Starship trip around the Moon with his wife Akiko. And that’s already two private trips booked for Starship!
Still, today, the gigantic SpaceX ship is still only testing.
Eighties crisis
” We didn’t really get to do a honeymoon, so with a lunar trip… Dennis Tito, in an interview for the CBS television channel, explained on October 12 why he had decided to publicly buy two seats on a Starship trip around the Moon.
Married in 2020 in the midst of a health crisis, the dashing 82-year-old multimillionaire and his wife Akiko dream of pushing the limits of leisure travel with SpaceX. Visiting the site in Texas, the very first space tourist couldn’t help but make a proposal to company officials, who didn’t procrastinate for long. The trip is not planned before 2025 at the earliest, the time to make the vehicle reliable, but also to fulfill the first Starship contracts, in particular with other billionaires like Jared Isaacman (first manned flight) and Yusaku Maezawa ( first lunar flight).
Dennis and Akiko Tito won’t be flying alone, ten other people should take their place with them, for a sum which, of course, has not been communicated.
Flying to the Moon, possible at any age?
Beyond reserving a place for a lunar flight on a vehicle that is far from having this capacity, Dennis wishes, as a pioneer of space tourism, “ inspire seniors who might think their horizons are limited “. Because not only is he a newlywed, but he feels much healthier than 22 years ago, during his Soyuz flight which he thinks every day “.
To prepare, the millionaire and his wife go to the gym daily to lift cast iron and dream of “ see the Earth getting smaller, smaller and smaller, and the Moon, growing, getting bigger and bigger through Starship’s portholes.
Starship, a long way
However, we will have to stay healthy for a while, because the Starship / SuperHeavy duo is not yet ready to fly. SpaceX, at the Boca Chica site in Texas, continues its long preparations for the first orbital flight with the BN7 and Starship SN24 booster prototypes. After a first ignition of 7 engines simultaneously at the end of August, the “complete” launcher is currently assembled on its orbital launch site awaiting new tests.
This is the first time since early spring that a Starship has been assembled with SuperHeavy, and operations are getting better and better under control, but there are still several steps before embarking on orbital flight. The SpaceX founder announces an attempt in November, which we will follow closely, but the schedules have already been pushed back several times since the last Starship test flight which took place in May 2021.
Source : SpaceFlightNow
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