Who Are The People On The Crew Of SpaceX's Mission To The Moon?

If space is ever to truly become the final frontier, it has to come within the reach of those who aren't party to government-funded scientific missions or billion-dollar fortunes. To give some billionaires due credit, they are investing money into efforts to eventually make space travel more viable for the average Earthling. In 2018, it was announced that SpaceX would send a manned spacecraft to circle the moon, crewed by artists rather than scientists or technicians. The name of the mission was Dear Moon (per Scientific American).

The target year for Dear Moon is 2023. However, SpaceX founder Elon Musk cautioned during the initial announcement that it wasn't a fixed date, and as of December 2022, the company's rockets and boosters had undergone only limited testing (via CNN). Plus, the goal of having a crew full of professional artists was amended during the selection process to accept any applicants, so long as they strove to innovate in their profession, saw their work as art, and were prepared to be team players. The status of the technology for Dear Moon may still have been iffy at the end of 2022, but the selection of a crew was finalized and announced in December. Mission leader Yusaku Maezawa took to YouTube to share their names with the world.

It's a varied group of people identifying as artists who have been chosen for the Deep Moon mission. The first person Yusaku Maezawa selected wasn't a painter or a sculptor, but a famous DJ: Steve Aoki, founder of Los Angeles's Dim Mak record label (per Submerge Magazine).

Aoki is the son of Hiroaki "Rocky" Aoki, who earned a fortune with his restaurant chain Benihana. Aoki has dabbled in the family business; as of 2008, he had set up his own restaurant in Los Angeles. Like Yusaku Maezawa, he's also done some work in fashion. But it's as a DJ and a music producer that he's been most active. Aoki has traveled the world to mix and play tracks, earning a Guinness World Record as the most-traveled musician for 2012 (per Florida Today). In describing his approach to DJing, Aoki told Submerge, "If you asked me the question, 'what's more important: skill or taste?' I'd tell you taste. If a guy's really skillful, but his tracks are just horrid, I don't care to listen to his skill."

After being selected for Deep Moon, Aoki told the mission's documentarians that he'd dreamed of going to space since childhood. His goals for the mission include DJing as the ship circles the moon and composing a song — or possibly an entire album — in space.

When Yemi A.D. was chosen as a member of the Deep Moon crew, he was so excited that he started dancing in his living room, oblivious to Yusaku Maezawa's continued presence on his Zoom call. It was as fitting as it was understandable; Yemi A.D.'s primary line of work is as a choreographer.

Yemi is a Czech citizen, but according to his personal website, he found his first professional break in Los Angeles. He began as a professional dancer but later moved behind the scenes and founded several schools of dance. JAD Productions, which Yemi established in 2010, has provided services for numerous high-profile clients, and Yemi has personally partnered with rapper Kanye West on films and live performances. Away from choreography, he acts as a goodwill ambassador for his native country and the United Nations.

Yemi is the first person from the Czech Republic to go into space in decades. He considers himself a representative of both his native country and Africa; his father was originally from Nigeria, and dance was a way for him to break down barriers as a young man. "In the beginning of my life, I thought that dance is my only language because it was a way for me ... to cross bridges between how I looked and everybody else looked where I'm from," he told the Dear Moon crew announcement team.

Florida Today once described Tim Dodd of Cedar Falls, Iowa as an "Earth-bound" astronaut, the kind of enthusiast for astronomy and space exploration that wouldn't make it off the ground but could rattle off knowledge on the subject with depth and enthusiasm. It's a description Dodd has embraced; his online persona is literally titled the Everyday Astronaut. For years, he went around the world in a spacesuit, taking photographs in character as a space traveler yearning for the means to go back. Under the same title, Dodd branched out into social media, including a popular YouTube channel dedicated to explaining everything that goes into space travel for the layman — which Dodd himself is, having no background in the field. And to think it all grew out of a joke purchase of an old Russian flight suit.

If all goes according to plan, the Everyday Astronaut won't remain trapped on terra firma forever. Dodd covered the initial announcement of the Dear Moon mission and was excited by the venture. But Dodd has also covered some of the more disastrous tests of SpaceX's rockets, and when announced as a crew member, he was very frank about his apprehensions. At the same time, he expressed confidence that the technology would be in place by the time Dear Moon was ready to launch. Among his goals for the trip is a recreation of a staged photograph he did as the Everyday Astronaut: eating with the Earth in the background.

As a mission of artists into space, Deep Moon was never going to lack documentation. But among its crew is genuine documentary filmmaker Brendan Hall. An aspiring director since age 12, as he told NBC's "Today" (via Yahoo! News), Hall studied at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Much of his work is dedicated to subjects in the natural world, and he's worked on behalf of everyone from National Geographic to "Bill Nye: Science Guy" (per his official website). His most recent feature-length film, "Parks for the People," had been scheduled for a summer 2023 release as of December 2022.

Hall's application to the Deep Moon mission was almost a fluke. "I just saw an article online," he told "Today." "I could have done anything different that day, like gotten a coffee, gotten a snack, and I would never have seen this opportunity ... it just seemed like this amazing thing, and I applied for it, and I just wanted to see what would happen." Photo and film cameras have rolled in outer space before, but in his official crew announcement video, Hall expressed enthusiasm to innovate on previous efforts through technique and technology.

The Dear Moon mission selected nine members for its crew, with two alternates on standby. One of the alternates, Kaitlyn Farrington, may not seem the ideal candidate for a mission of artists, at least under a narrow definition of the word. She is an athlete, specifically a snowboarder who won gold at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (per ESPN). Farrington was ambitious to continue with snowboarding as a career, but the year after her Olympic win, a comparatively minor wipeout left her unable to move. An MRI revealed that she suffered from congenital cervical stenosis, a condition where the vertebrae in an affected person's neck are too narrow, putting the spinal cord at serious risk of injury. While Farrington can still walk and even snowboard, the intense performance of competitive snowboarding was impossible for her to continue safely, and after a long struggle to accept the diagnosis, she announced her retirement in 2015.

Farrington hasn't given up on her passion. Since retiring competitively, she's embarked on what she described to the Dear Moon video team as an adventuring career. While disappointed at not being chosen for the main crew, Farrington will undergo astronaut training with the rest and expressed interest in offering an alternative perspective on the mission, being an athlete rather than an artist.