'Dangerous' moon mission eases Musk's woes

In a hangar in a gritty industrial corner of Los Angeles, the dreams of one man to fly to the moon, and another to send him there, were laid out for the watching world.

As Elon Musk introduced Yusaku Maezawa as the first private passenger to sign up for his SpaceX moonshot, the private space race was stepped up a gear.

But Maezawa brings more than high-energy enthusiasm to the project, the undisclosed amount he will pay is critical to whether it actually happens at all.

The Big Falcon Rocket has not been built and not even Musk is willing to guarantee it will happen. Even if it does, he says "it will be dangerous".

Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire musician, fashion designer, art collector and entrepreneur, expects to take a group of artists with him into orbit within five years. His project is called Dear Moon and he clearly wants some big names.

But the unveiling, in the shadow of the engines of two massive and gleaming rockets, was also a testament to Musk's belief in making humans a multi-planet species.

It is the excitement of the space programme, he says, that gets him up in the morning.

Looping a human around the moon is just the first stage of a plan that is targeted on the moon, Mars, Jupiter and beyond.

SpaceX has been an undoubted success story in the private space race. Musk says the company's contracts with NASA remain its priority and it will start shuttling astronauts to the international Space Station next year.

NASA is itself aiming to send astronauts into orbit beyond the moon by 2022, fifty-years after the Apollo 8 mission became the first to send humans beyond low earth orbit.

Musk makes much of sending people to the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo programme on 1972.

Maezawa, he hopes, will be the first of many to make such an epic journey.

Questions at the event, we were told, were to stay "on topic" and it been a turbulent few weeks for Musk.

Last week, video of him smoking marijuana during a podcast appearance sent Tesla shares tumbling.

In August he had shocked investors by flirting on Twitter with the idea of taking Tesla private. It was later confirmed the company would remain public.

The moon journey announcement came just hours after it was confirmed that the British diver Vernon Unsworth had filed a defamation lawsuit over Musk labelling him a "pedo".

Talking about space, it is clear, is much more of a comfort zone for a man who is not a natural public performer.

If his passion for space exploration could guarantee its success he would have little to worry about.

Instead it will be the engineers of SpaceX who have to solve some of the greatest engineering problems on this planet to make reaching others realistic.

Elon Musk is now not the only one with a lot riding on this mission.