Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa teases a “big update” for Tuesday, March 2. And while we don’t know what this update might be, we certainly know that it’s about the moon, which has the potential to be very interesting news.
Why is it interesting? Maezawa has an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be the company’s first civilian passenger on the moon, whenever it actually happens, and wants to put other civilians into lunar orbit by 2023.
Maezawa posted on Twitter late Thursday asking if anyone wants to fly to the moon with him, suggesting that he will either apply for tickets or has already chosen a few suitors.
The #dearmoon project was announced by Maezawa in order to attract artists up close and personal with Luna, although CNET points out that I 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 kind of paintings would he have drawn?” Maezawa asked on his website in 2018. “If John Lennon could see the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If he had gone into space, what would the world look like today? ”
It is a really interesting and serious question in an age of cynicism and anxiety. And it’s hard to guess whether artists will return from lunar orbit with better ideas than they will return with an exotic space disease that will eventually destroy humanity.
But it is worth asking how our attitudes about space travel can change the course of history, as they did very clearly in the 1950s and 60s, though not always in ways we hoped. The baby boomers have grown and they have been told they will visit the shape of a donut space colonies and one day take theirs holidays on the moon. Kraft Foods has even offered some a life-size missile simulator lucky children in 1959.
These children of the ’50s and’ 60s were promised that the world would be better, all due to the progress made in space. The question was “when” not “if” we would all be exploding on the moon.
Those promises turned out to be lies. Rapid improvements in space technology have been used extensively to push the Cold War agenda against the Soviet Union. Why don’t we have a permanent colony on the moon yet? Probably because you don’t need one nuke Moscow. The space shuttle program was very good to get to America spy satellites in orbit, even though most people haven’t seen them that way.
Maybe it’s time for a new era of serious space travel. We may not get there if we are not billionaires or a select handful of artists. But a collective dream can change the world. It may not always change for the better, but after the last year of his life through a pandemic and a neo-fascist revolt, it is difficult to see how he could behave.