As a new day dawns, our first question is: What has Elon Musk tweeted overnight? It’s usually something memorable.
Last night was no exception. Monk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (A.k.a. SpaceX) announced on Twitter it has booked its first space tourist to go on a rocket ship around the moon. SpaceX will be revealing the space tourist’s identity in a press conference on Sept. 17. Will it be a boy or a girl? It’s anybody’s guess, but Musk did reply to a tweet with a Japanese flag emoji, prompting speculation that the tourist is from Japan.
🇯🇵
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 14, 2018
Twitter users started speculating as to who the space tourist might be: Takemitsu Takizaki? Daisuke Enomoto? Satoshi Nakamoto?
Only 24 humans have been to the Moon in history, SpaceX tweeted, and no one has visited since the last Apollo mission in 1972. SpaceX had initially planned to launch two space tourists into orbit this year, but the countdown had to be pushed back to mid-2019.
SpaceX celebrated its 16th successful launch and recovery of the year on Monday, delivering a Canadian communication satellite into orbit. Its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), which is supposed to be able to fly to Mars, is reported to start being tested in March 2019. The company says it will begin test launches with passengers in April 2019.
SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell gave a more generous time frame for the BFR in a TED Talk in April, saying it would launch “within a decade.”
She asked the public this week not to get so caught up in Musk’s Twitter activities. “Elon is a brilliant man,” Shotwell said in Paris. “He is as lucid and capable as he has ever been. I wish people would not focus on triviality.”