Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is causing a “big update” for Tuesday, March 2nd. And while we don’t know what this update might be, we definitely know that this is the moon, which can be very exciting news.
Why is it exciting? Maezawa has a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be the company’s first civilian passenger on the Moon, as long as that really happens, and he wants to put other civilians in lunar orbit in 2023.
Maezawa tweeted late thursday asking if anyone wants to fly to the moon with him, implying that he will apply for enrollment or that he has already chosen some candidates.
The #dearmoon project was announced by Maezawa with the goal of bringing artists closer to the moon, although CNET notes 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 kind of paintings would he have drawn?” Maezawa asked on his website in 2018. “If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone into space, what would the world look like today? ”
It’s 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 with an exotic space disease that will wipe out humanity.
But it’s worth asking how our attitudes about space travel can change the course of history, as they did very clearly in the 1950s and 1960s, though not always. forms we had expected. Baby boomers grew up when they were told they would visit donut shape space colonies and one day they take theirs holidays on the moon. Kraft Foods even gave some a life-size rocket simulator lucky kids in 1959.
These children of the 50s and 60s were promised that the world would be better, all thanks to the advances made in space. The question was “when” not “if” we would all be throwing at the Moon.
These promises turned out to be lies. Rapid improvements in space technology were largely used to drive the Cold War agenda against the Soviet Union. Why don’t we still have a permanent colony on the Moon? Probably because you don’t need any nuke Moscow. The space shuttle program was very good to get to America spy satellites in orbit, although most people did not see them that way.
Perhaps the time has come for a new era of serious longing to travel in space. We may not get there if we are not billionaires or a 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 a pandemic and a neo-fascist uprising, it’s hard to see how it could be handled.