Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is teasing a “major update” for Tuesday, March 2nd. And while we do not yet know what this update may be, we certainly know that it is about the moon, which may have the exciting news.
Why is it 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 wants to put other citizens in a lunar orbit by 2023.
Maezawa tweeted late thursday ask if anyone wants to fly with him to the moon and indicate that he is going to request entries, or that he has already selected a few candidates.
The #dearmoon project was announced by Maezawa with the aim of getting artists close to the moon, although CNET points out that we have not heard much about the project since the announcement in 2010 Sept 2018.
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“If Pablo Picasso could see 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 they went to space, what would the world look like today? ‘
This is a very interesting and serious question in an era of cynicism and anxiety. And it’s hard to guess whether artists will return more from the lunar orbit with better ideas than with an exotic space sickness that will eventually wipe out humanity.
But it is worth asking how our attitude towards space travel can change the course of history, as it did very clearly in the 1950s and ’60s, although not always in the ways we hoped. Baby boomers grew up saying they would visit donut-shaped space colonies and one day take their own holidays on the moon. Kraft Foods has even given away a life-size rocket simulator to some happy children in 1959.
These kids of the ’50s and’ 60s were promised that the world would be better, all thanks to advances in space. The question was “when” not “if” we would all blow off to the Moon.
These promises turn out to be lies. The rapid improvements in space technology have been largely used to advance the Cold War agenda. against the soviet union. Why do we not yet have a permanent colony on the moon? Probably because you do not need one nuke moscow. The spacecraft program was very good at getting America’s to spy on satellites in orbit, even though most people did not see them that way.
Maybe it’s time for a new era of serious longing for space travel. We might 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 it for the better, but after years of a pandemic and a neo-fascist uprising, it’s hard to see how it can weather.