On 9p.m. EST, September 17th, Spacex conducted a Youtube livestream event to reveal interesting advancements in the much anticipated Big Falcon Rocket. The location of the livestream appeared to be Spacex Headquarters, with massive cylinders of rocket surrounding a small audience of Spacex employees and reporters from around the country.
Elon Musk began the presentation by reiterating his resolute goal: “for humanity to be a spacefaring civilization, a future where we are one among the stars.” He then commenced his presentation by explaining the design of BFR. Changes were made to the design recently, and they were absolutely new. “The way this flies is very counterintuitive,” he says. “Imagine it’s like a skydiver falling.”
He also adds that the engine design is so innovative that it would be difficult to even for an average person to even frame the right question to ask about it. The two screens on the sides of the stage displayed the physics of the rocket landing in unison as Musk continued to talk about how it would get the rocket to the moon.
The awaited announcement of the evening was about the first private passenger to travel to the moon. Yusaku Maezawa is a Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur, and art collector – the man who volunteered to travel to the moon on the BFR. He was sporting a blue jacket and walked up the stage, and introduced himself to the crowd.
“Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the Moon! I choose to go to the moon with artists!” Maezawa said.
He expressed that his love for the moon and how it inspires artists was the foundation for project #dearMoon.
“I would like to invite six to eight artists from around the world to join me on this mission to the Moon,” he said. “These artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth, and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within all of us.”
Maezawa says he hasn’t decided which artists he’d like to invite yet, but he would like them to represent many different fields, such as painters, musicians, film directors, and more.
Maezawa says he was inspired by imagining what his favorite artists would have created if they had traveled to space. “What if Picasso had gone to the Moon?
Or Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or John Lennon?” he asked at the event. “What about Coco Chanel? These are all artists that I adore.”
Elon Musk says that there will definitely be test flights and probably one complete trip to the moon with no passengers in BFR. He meticulously says that it would be a bad idea to send 100 people (BFR’s passenger capacity) on the first trip. So they would probably start with about a dozen.
“This is a very dangerous mission.” he says. Maezawa had made a large donation to the project and was still confident about the mission despite impending dangers. “This has restored my faith in humanity,” Musk added, creating a sense of melancholy in the room. And Maezawa is yet to choose the artists and other professionals on the trip with him. “If you should hear from me, please say yes and accept my invitation,” Maezawa said. “Please don’t say no.”
