Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX has enrolled its first passenger for a trip around the moon. When the trip goes ahead, it will be the first time someone has traveled as far as the moon since NASA's Apollo missions in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and also the furthest into space that a private passenger has ever traveled.
The announcement is a giant leap toward commercial space travel, with SpaceX, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos all pursuing the goal of commercial space flight.
SpaceX tweeted the news on Thursday evening, announcing that it will reveal the identity of the traveler and why they want to go on Monday, September 17.
After someone responded to the tweet by jokingly suggesting that Musk himself will be the passenger, the SpaceX CEO offered a hint about the person who is traveling, responding with a Japanese flag emoji. He also confirmed that the rendering of the spacecraft in the company's original tweet is a new version of SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
While the company has had successful rocket launches before now, this new announcement would appear to be a first step along the way to Musk's dreams of interplanetary travel.
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