CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX said Monday it will fly two people to the moon next year, a feat not attempted since NASA’s Apollo heyday close to half a century ago.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk — the company’s founder — announced the surprising news Monday.

Two people who know one another approached the company about sending them on a weeklong flight just beyond the moon, according to Musk. He won’t identify the pair or the price tag. They’ve already paid a “significant” deposit, he noted.

Musk said SpaceX is on track to launch astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in mid-2018. This moon mission would follow about six months later, by the end of the year under the current schedule, using a Dragon crew capsule and a Falcon heavy rocket.

The moon mission is designed to be autonomous — unless something goes wrong, Musk said.

“I think they are entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here,” Musk told reporters in a telephone news conference.

Musk said he does not have permission to release the passengers’ names, and he was hesitant to even say if they were men, women or even pilots. He would only admit, “It’s nobody from Hollywood.”

The passengers would make a long loop around the moon, skimming the lunar surface and then going well beyond, perhaps 300,000 or 400,000 miles distance altogether. The mission won’t involve a lunar landing, according to Musk.

It’s about 240,000 miles to the moon alone, one way.

NASA will have first dibs on a similar mission if it so chooses, Musk said. The space agency learned of his plan at the same time as reporters, and was busy preparing a statement following the announcement.

“This should be a really exciting mission that hopefully gets the world really excited about sending people into deep space again,” he said.