Japanese billionaire abandons search for space girlfriend

The greatest potential love story of our time has already come to a crushing end.

Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has scrapped plans for a dating show on which he'd search for a girlfriend to take to space after receiving more than 27,000 applications, The Verge reports.

Maezawa, who's planning a trip around the moon with SpaceX in 2023, previously announced he was seeking a "life partner" to join him, writing that "with that future partner of mine, I want to shout our love and world peace from outer space." This was to be part of a "match-making event," a TV documentary called Full Moon Lovers.

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But Maezawa has now announced that actually, never mind, writing on Twitter that "due to personal reasons, I have informed AbemaTV yesterday with my decision to no longer participate in the matchmaking documentary, hence requested for the cancellation of the show." Full Moon Lovers will presumably no longer come to be, unless some other billionaire also seeking a space girlfriend can take over at the last minute.

Apparently, though, Maezawa's plan for the trip around the moon remain, per BBC News. Meanwhile, the bidding war in Hollywood for the rights to a Full Moon Lovers romantic comedy is presumably already underway.