“I choose to go to the moon.”

Those were among the first words uttered on stage Monday night by Yusaku Maezawa, the mysterious passenger whose existence SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had teased on Twitter last week. Maezawa, a Japanese retail entrepreneur and art collector, stood before a small crowd at SpaceX headquarters and announced that he had also secured tickets for several companions on this week-long journey into space: a half-dozen artists that he will later select and invite along.

Maezawa, who is 42, will the first paying customer to hitch a ride to space on the Big Falcon Rocket, SpaceX’s next-generation rocket. While the rocket and spaceship are still years away from flight, Musk estimated that the circuit around the moon could happen as soon as 2023. He stressed that the vehicle would only carry passengers after several uncrewed test flights were completed.

“We have to set some kind of date [to work to],” Musk said to the assembled crowd. “If everything goes 100 percent right, then this is the date. But there are many uncertainties.”

“Why do I want to go to the moon,” Maezawa mused to the audience. “This is very meaningful. I thought long and hard about this, and at the same time I thought about how I can give back to the world.” As part of a project called Dear Moon, Maezawa will invite (and pay for) a group of six to eight artists of varying backgrounds and specialties to accompany him to the moon. Just as generations of humans have looked up and been inspired by the sight of Earth's comely natural satellite, Maezawa says he hopes the artists who go with him will be moved by the experience to create unique works.

Musk described it as a universal art project. “I hope this is really seen as a very positive thing and something that people are very excited about,” Musk says. “This is no walk in the park, it will require a lot of training. When you’re pushing the frontier, it’s not a sure thing.”

This band of artists will be travelling in SpaceX’s still-in-development behemoth, the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR for short. The vehicle is expected to stand 348 feet tall, or roughly the height of a 35-story building. (That puts it well above both the Falcon 9, which stands about 230 feet tall, and the 305-foot Statue of Liberty).

The company signed a lease in April not too far from SpaceX headquarters, where it will build the BFR. Musk first proposed the idea of the BFR in 2016 at the International Astronautical Congress, an annual space conference that takes place every fall in Guadalajara, Mexico. At that time, Musk referred to it as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), and it amounted to little more than spaceship renderings. It also lacked a clear funding plan. But one year later, ITS got a face lift and a new name: the BFR.

The BFR is actually two vehicles in one: a huge booster rocket and a Big Falcon Spaceship (BFS). During his 2017 talk at that same conference, Musk revealed that 31 Raptor engines—each capable of producing 380,000 pounds of thrust—would propel the rocket portion of BFR. The Raptor engines are still in development, but with the combined power of 31 of them, the BFR would be capable of putting up to 100 tons of payload into low-Earth orbit. (Currently, the Falcon 9 can boost about 25 tons to low-Earth orbit). Continuing in Falcon’s footsteps, BFR will also be a reusable rocket, using these same engines to land back on Earth after launch.