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World’s First Space Tourist, Billionaire Dennis Tito, Buys 2 Seats on SpaceX’s Starship

Because not even retirement is the same for billionaires as it’s for us normies, 82-year-old Dennis Tito has just booked a seat on the second manned, private mission on SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The mission doesn’t even have a timeline yet, since the rocket is still in development.
Billionaire Dennis Tito and wife Akiko will become the first civilian couple to do a Moon flyby, with SpaceX's Starship 9 photos
Photo: YouTube / CBS News
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Dennis Tito is widely known as the first-ever space tourist, meaning the first civilian to travel to space on his own money. In 2001, he paid $20 million to fly on a Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station in what he called the most exhilarating (and expensive, no doubt) vacation he’d ever been on.

This time, Tito is planning on turning it into a post-nuptial vacation because he’s bringing his wife of two years, Akiko, along. Dennis is 82 years old as of the time of press, and SpaceX doesn’t have a timeline for the mission that would see him and Akiko become the first civilian couple on a circumlunar mission, but he says he feels in much better shape than two decades ago when he wrote space (tourism) history.

Speaking to the media about the purchase, Tito says he’s been looking for something to fill up his time since he retired. He won’t reveal how much he paid for the two tickets. Still, given his estimated net worth of $1 billion, it’s not probably an amount that he’ll be losing too much sleep over. A former engineer and entrepreneur, Tito shares the same kind of passion for space exploration as Akiko, who is a certified pilot and engineer and occasional real estate investor.

According to SpaceNews, the mission will see the two, along with ten other civilians, spend three days flying to the Moon, swing around it without entering orbit, and then head back home to Earth. In total, they will spend one week in space. Tito believes he will “likely” retire from spaceflight upon his return..

Other than the details above, no further specifics about the mission were made public, and with good reason: SpaceX is still working on the Starship rocket prototype, which is yet to make its first orbital launch attempt, and the Titos’ flight is the second on schedule, after Yusaku Maezawa’s. In the CBS interview below, Dennis Tito says that, in the worst-case scenario, he estimates his flight will take place in five years’ time, which many believe to be wildly optimistic.

For SpaceX, these first two manned, private missions are the first and most significant step towards space tourism and what CEO Elon Musk calls his mission of making humankind a multi-planetary species. “This mission is really groundbreaking in that it puts us on a very firm step towards airline-like operations, where now, for the first time, you can buy an individual seat to the moon,” Starship crew and cargo programs Aarti Matthews says.

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Editor's note: Photos in the gallery show Starship Super Heavy Booster 7 firing its Raptor engines.

About the author: Elena Gorgan
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Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends.
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