World’s first space tourist Dennis Tito to ride to moon again on SpaceX

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World’s first space tourist, Dennis Tito, has signed up with the Elon Musk Company SpaceX, to fly around the Moon aboard the Starship rocket.

The SpaceX Company on 12 October 2022 said that the rocket will take Tito and his wife, Akiko, within 200km (125 miles) of the far side of the Moon without landing on its surface.  The date of the launch has yet to be announced as the Starship is yet to be tested.

Dennis Tito, an American engineer and entrepreneur became the first human space tourist to visit the International Space Station in 2001.

He was launched onboard a Russian rocket with the help of US-based Space Adventures in 2001.

Few companies in the world are striving to make space travel a reality. They are SpaceX , Richard Branson-founded Virgin Galactic SPCE.N, and  Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin  which currently offers suborbital joyrides that hit an altitude of about 106km (66 miles) above the Earth.

90 year old American actor, William Shatner, who played the role of Captain James T Kirk on the TV series Star Trek, became the oldest person to ride a rocket into space when he travelled on a Blue Origin flight last year.

Human Space Flight 

The first person to go into space was Yury Gagarin of the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961 onboard the Vostok Rocket.

The first woman to go into space was Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union on 16 June 1963 onboard the Vostok 6 Rocket.

The first American to go into space was Alan Shepard in 1961.

Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma is the only Indian to go into space. He was part of the Soviet mission aboard Soyuz T-11 on 3 April 1984.