Pan Am took reservations for flights to the moon – years before Elon Musk

Longest flight delay ever.

Elon Musk may have promised to make commercial space travel an everyday occurrence with SpaceX, but those with infinite memories will recall the idea floated many moons ago — while one potential carrier even handed out IOUs.

Pan Am – the airline considered to be among the best in the world during the so-called Golden Age of travel – is said to have at one point had its sights set far beyond London’s Idlewild flight.

At the height of the space race in the late 1960s, the flyer promised bookings for future flights to the moon for 100,000 people.

At that point, leaving Earth’s orbit was a feat bested by trained astronauts like Neil Armstrong, who touched down on the lunar surface in 1969.

But that didn’t stop Pan Am from issuing 93,000 membership cards to the “first flights to the moon” club, starting in 1968 — anticipating the day when technology would catch up to the dream and the demand.

Famed news anchor Walter Cronkite was just one daredevil on the lucky list, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The year 2000 was given as the probable start date of the trips – but Pan Am went bankrupt nine years before fulfilling her promise.

The strange idea was born in 1964 when Gerhard Pistor, an Austrian journalist, asked a travel agency in Vienna to book him a trip to the moon.

The reporter’s request was eventually forwarded to Pan Am, who recognized the opportunity for a major marketing scam.

Demand for admission to The First Moon Flights Club was apparently so great that the company, suffering financial difficulties in the early 1970s, pulled the plug on new requests.

“The [club] was labeled by many as a publicity stunt,” according to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“But Pan Am representatives maintained even in the 1980s that it was a real program, insisting that the airline would honor its reservations and that sustained space travel was inevitable.”

Houston-based Intuitive Machines became the first private company to land a plane on the moon in early 2024.

Odysseus touched down on the lunar surface on Feb. 22 — and stopped working a week later, The Post previously reported.