By Samantha Masunaga

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — In a first, SpaceX officials said Monday that the company plans to fly private, paying citizens around the moon next year. It would mark the return of astronauts to deep space after 45 years.

The Hawthorne-based space company said in a statement that the two individuals have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission in its Dragon 2 spacecraft. Initial training, along with health and fitness tests, will occur later this year, SpaceX said.

“This will be a private mission to a paying customer,” said Chief Executive Elon Musk. He wouldn’t say who will make the flight, scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2018, or how much they’re paying. He would say only that the astronauts are “nobody from Hollywood.”

During a conference call with reporters, Musk said the aspiring astronauts know the risks they’re taking on in such a mission.

“I think they’re entering this with their eyes open,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can to minimize that risk, but it’s not zero.”

The weeklong mission would make a close fly-by of the moon’s surface, “go quite a bit further out into deep space” and then loop back to Earth, Musk said. The spacecraft will not try to land on the surface of the moon.

He said there could be a market for one or two of these missions a year.

The capsule is to launch from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which is more powerful than the rockets the company has used to launch satellites. Falcon Heavy is set to have its first flight this summer.

Pad 39A was the launch pad for Apollo and space shuttle missions. The last moon landing was Apollo 17 in 1972.

Musk said he would be willing to give NASA the first chance to combine with SpaceX on a lunar orbit mission, if the space agency is interested.

“NASA would have priority in any lunar mission,” he said. “In the absence of that, it would just be two private individuals on board.”