US-based SpaceX is making a bid to become the first company to take private citizens on a leisure flight into space, when they will skim the lunar surface.
SpaceX claims it has a mission planned for late 2018 and says it has already taken ‘significant’ deposits from would-be passengers.
The spacecraft which will take the two unnamed people into space is set for its first unmanned test flight later this year.
"This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years," SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the BBC.
The leisure flight will make a loop around the Moon, skimming the lunar surface, and then going well beyond, Musk said.
Virgin Atlantic founder Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is proposing to send tourists on short sub-orbital flights but its SpaceShipTwo vehicle crash-landed in 2014 and it hasn’t given a start date for commercial operations.
