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SpaceX signs its first passenger to fly aboard the Big Falcon Rocket Moon mission

SpaceX is building its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to head to the moon. And now, the company has announced that it has signed its first private passenger to hop onboard the rocket. Through its official Twitter handle, SpaceX announced that it has signed the world's first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard the BFR launch vehicle. The mystery on who is flying and why will be unraveled on September 17, 2018.

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SpaceX is building its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to head to the moon. And now, the company has announced that it has signed its first private passenger to hop onboard the rocket. Through its official Twitter handle, SpaceX announced that it has signed the world's first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard the BFR launch vehicle. The mystery on who is flying and why will be unraveled on September 17, 2018.

The BFR is being built to send humans to the Moon and Mars. It boasts a design, called Big Falcon Spaceship or BFS, which is a combination of rocket and spaceship, Mashable reported. Both BFR and BFS are reusable and can be utilised for launching satellites. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has even proposed the idea of using them for point-to-point travel on earth. 

Indian-origin US astronaut Sunita Williams is among the nine astronauts named by NASA on Friday for its first human spaceflight programme since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. After years of vehicle development and building anticipation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has now put the crew in commercial crew spacecraft.

The space agency announced that the nine astronauts will launch on the first crewed test flights and missions of new commercial spacecraft built and operated by The Boeing Company and SpaceX.

The eight active NASA astronauts and one former astronaut-turned-corporate crew member will launch on Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Dragoncapsules to the International Space Station beginning in 2019.

The missions will mark the first crewed launches from US soil since the end of the space shuttle programme seven years ago. In addition to naming the crews of the test flights, NASA also announced today the four astronauts who will fly aboard the first operational Starliner and Dragon missions to the space station. Both vehicles were developed in cooperation with NASA to deliver crew members to and from the orbiting laboratory.

Josh Cassada, 45, will fly with Sunita ("Suni") Williams, 52, aboard NASA's first contracted Starliner mission. It will be Cassada's first spaceflight. Williams previously logged 321 days in orbit on two stays aboard the space station, most recently returning to the Earth in 2012.

The commercial crew members took to the stage during an event led by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken, 48, and Douglas Hurley, 51, will fly together as SpaceX's first Dragon crew. Veterans of two spaceflights each, Behnken and Hurley will lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39A the same Florida launch pad where the space shuttle left Earth for the last time in July 2011 with Hurley as pilot.

With inputs from ANI

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