Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is teasing a “big update” for Tuesday, March 2. And while we don’t know yet what this update could be, we’re sure it’s about the moon, which could be potentially very exciting news.
Why is it so exciting? Maezawa has an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be the company’s first civilian passenger to the moon, whenever that happens, and he plans to put other civilians into orbit by 2023.
Maezawa tweeted late Thursday Asking if anyone wants to fly to the moon with him, which indicates that he is either going to ask for submissions or that he has already picked some contenders.
The #dearmoon project was announced by Maezawa with the aim of bringing artists up close and personal with the moon CNET points out that we haven’t heard much about the project since it was announced in September 2018
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“If Pablo Picasso could have seen the moon up close, what paintings would he have drawn?” Maezawa asked on his website in 2018If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the earth, what songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, what would the world have been like today? “
It’s a really interesting and serious question in an age of cynicism and fear. And it’s hard to guess whether artists will come out of orbit with better ideas any more than they will with an exotic space sickness that will eventually wipe out humanity.
But it is worth wondering how our views on space travel can change the course of history, as they very clearly did in the 1950s and 1960s, although not always in the ways we hopedBaby boomers were told they would visit the shape of a donut space colonies and one day their own holidays on the moonKraft Foods has even given away a life-size missile simulator to some happy children in 1959
These ’50s and’ 60s kids were given the promise that the world would be better, all thanks to advancements in space. The question was “when” and not “if” we would all fly to the moon.
Those promises turned out to be lies. The rapid advancements in space technology were largely used to push the Cold War agenda against the Soviet UnionWhy don’t we have a permanent colony on the moon yet? Probably because you don’t need one nuke MoscowThe space shuttle program was very good at getting America’s spy satellites orbiting the eartheven if most people didn’t see them that way.
Perhaps it is time for a new era of genuine desire for space travel. We might not get there if we’re not a billionaire or a select few artists. But a collective dream can change the world. It may not always change it for the better, but after the last year of a pandemic and neo-fascist uprising, it’s hard to see how it could be behaved.