1st non-public moon flight passenger to ask artistic visitors

Maezawa has not revealed the price of his trip, but Musk said it was "a lot of money". The company said the passengers paid a "significant deposit" for the trip but did not identify them. Maezawa, 42, with a real-time net worth of 2.9 billion dollars, is also an avid art collector. The SpaceX rocket was first announced in 2016, and is more powerful than the Saturn V Moon rocket which launched the Apollo missions.

Musk described a slightly scaled-down 348-foot-tall rocket in September 2017 and announced that the private space company aimed to launch two cargo missions to Mars in 2022.

He said: "In 2023, as the host, I would like to invite six to eight artists from around the world to join me on this missions to the Moon".

"It's always been there, it's always been inside of me", Maezawa said, before transitioning to Japanese to say the moon has always "felt like it's protecting me".

Maezawa made his fortune by founding the wildly popular shopping site Zozotown. "These artists will be asked to create something when they return to the Earth and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamers within all of us", Maezawa said during a press conference at SpaceX headquarters.

Elon Musk looked enthusiastic and excited at the event.

However, Musk said that rocket would not be certified to carry people, which ruled out a round-the-moon trip on a Falcon Heavy.

In an interview in March, Musk said the ship was now being built, adding "I think we'll probably be able to do short flights, short sort of up-and-down flights, probably sometime in the first half of next year".

Mr Maezawa then explained he had hired the entire shuttle, not just one seat, adding that he wanted to be joined by several artists. The reusable 387ft rocket will have its own dedicated passenger ship.The mission will not involve a lunar landing.

SpaceX/YouTube Musk released the proposed trajectory of the first lunar SpaceX flight with a paying customer, which could take place as early as 2023.

The spaceship consists of a massive rocket booster set to out-power any that has ever been built before, and a towering spacecraft, nicknamed BFS for Big Falcon Spaceship, that will vault out of the Earth's atmosphere.