Starship to Carry Space Tourist on Mars Flyby Mission
During an attempt to fly the first 'Block 3' Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle on May 21st, which failed to proceed due to pad issues, SpaceX announced that passengers for its first crewed Mars flyby mission are booking.
The first passenger to book, appearing during the launch broadcast of the twelfth flight test, was revealed to be the Maltese-Kittitian Chun Wang, who flew aboard the polar orbiting Fram2 in early 2025. To book his slot on that flight and the Mars one, Wang made significant amounts of money by investing in cryptocurrency.
Ahead of the Mars flyby mission, SpaceX shared that he has also secured a slot onboard a flyby of the Moon, joining a flight booked by Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito back in 2022. Like Wang, Dennis Tito has already been to space, but decades ago in 2001 aboard a Russian Soyuz for a weeklong stay aboard the International Space Station, having gained his wealth via running an investment firm.
Both the lunar and Mars flyby missions will use the Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle, which has never flown to orbit to date. None of the known crew are professional astronauts and are space tourists.
Starship's lunar flyby mission with the Tito's and Wang is not the first time such a mission has been booked. In 2018, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa booked a ride atop of Falcon Heavy inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft, a plan that was eventually scrapped after the company decided not to human-rate the tri-core rocket. Luckily for Maezawa he was upgraded to Starship, then yet to leave Earth's atmosphere, after which he invited eight creatives to join him. However by mid-2024, the lunar flyby was cancelled by the billionaire, citing delays to the flight he had booked six years prior by then and reportedly spent hundreds of millions on.
Any mission with Starship-Super Heavy carrying people onboard will be many years away from today, as SpaceX will need to fly the vehicle dozens to hundreds of times to demonstrate it is safe to customers who likely value their lives. A simple Earth orbiting crewed flight was booked in 2024 by Jared Isaacman, who is now NASA Administrator, consequently placing that mission in limbo.
Additionally, to fly by the Moon or Mars in-space refueling between Starships will need to be proven, something planned for last year but pushed many months into the future due to repeated flight test failures.
Beyond space tourists, SpaceX has existing contracts to operate Starship around lunar space, notably with a multi-billion-dollar one from NASA to put American astronauts onto the surface as part of the Artemis program. According to a recent Office of Inspector General report, the company is running behind schedules from the space agency.
