group of creatives stood slightly dazed in a Four Seasons hotel conference room in Houston, staring at three random ping-pong tables. A few were still bleary-eyed and jet-lagged after flying in from Iceland, Prague, London, and other parts of the world. Over the past few months, they had been whittled down from a million applicants, advanced through rounds of intensive interviews, and undergone a rigorous health screening to find themselves face to face with an enigmatic billionaire benefactor. Now, in September 2021, there was another hurdle: Their chance to travel to the moon hinged on an impromptu game of ping-pong. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. It was yet another quirk in the pinch-me-is-this-real journey that led 10 artists through a euphoric and devastating three-year voyage to land a seat on the world’s first-ever private lunar mission, an ambitious and philanthropic project called dearMoon. “I definitely had moments where I said, ‘Am I part of a Japanese reality-TV show?’” Brooklyn filmmaker Brendan Hall says, laughing, to Rolling Stone about auditioning to go to space. “You’re in a conference room in front of a Japanese billionaire surrounded by artists from around the world trying to decide if you’re going to the moon. It’s such a ridiculous thing to even be a part of. It was never lost on me how crazy the opportunity was.” The billionaire in question was Yusaku Maezawa, a smiley businessman and rare-art collector who The New York Times once described as a “tabloid fixture” in his home country. The former hardcore punk drummer — who also has a penchant for cooking up flashy social media stunts — spearheaded the art-focused initiative in 2018, paying an unspecified yet astronomical sum to Elon Musk to reserve his seat on SpaceX’s pioneering Starship launch scheduled for 2023. Maezawa — who goes by the nickname “MZ” — and Musk seemed giddy as they perched themselves on foldable chairs in front of a cheering crowd. A behemoth of a rocket engine served as backdrop for their anticipated announcement at the old SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Maezawa beamed as he declared he’d be the first private passenger to journey around the moon in a SpaceX vessel. The news itself signaled that visionaries were willing to invest untold millions of dollars into what was basically a celestial vanity project. But Maezawa wanted to go further, gifting the rest of the seats on the spacecraft to a team of artists. Following a similar dayslong flight path as Apollo 13, the artists would be “asked to create something after they return to Earth,” Maezawa said of the mission. Echoing President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech in 1962, Maezawa added, “I choose to go to the moon, with artists.” In the end, Maezawa named eight artists as the core flight-crew members alongside two alternates. They included musicians Steve Aoki and Big Bang’s T.O.P; documentary filmmaker Brendan Hall; nature photographer Karim Iliya; and renowned dancers Miyu and Yemi Akinyemi Dele, a.k.a. Yemi A.D., a Czech-Nigerian multidisciplinary creative who choreographed the ballet sequence in Kanye West’s “Runaway” music video. DearMoon also broadened the “artist” label to include nontraditional art forms, such as creator Tim Dodd, who runs the popular YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut, and motivational speaker Kaitlyn Farrington, an Olympic gold-medalist snowboarder. Two of the flight-crew members would make history in their own right. Actor Dev Joshi, 24, would be the youngest person ever to travel to the moon, and photographic artist and author Rhiannon Adam would be the first Irish person in space. (Aoki, T.O.P, Miyu, and Joshi did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for interviews. Maezawa did not respond to multiple interview requests or request for comment.) But the artists would never get off the ground. Maezawa called off the dearMoon project last June, rationalizing that he couldn’t keep the crew’s lives on hold after Starship blew past its target of 2023 and still didn’t have an exact launch date. “I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer,” he wrote on X, “hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time.” The six of 10 dearMoon members who spoke to Rolling Stone about their experience, though, all say they would have waited decades to participate in the mission. “I don’t know one person that would’ve rather had the mission dropped than wait,” Dodd says. As the balance of power in American society and government becomes even more concentrated in the hands of the 0.1 percent, the story of dearMoon doubles as a cautionary tale of billionaires and their whimsies. The dearMoon members were thrust onto the world stage and required to invest themselves into a dream that apparently had an arbitrary time limit before being discarded. Nearly a year after the bitter disappointment, the crew members have tried to come to terms with, as Adam describes it, the “headfuck of it all.” THE WORLD IS IN THE MIDST of a new dawn of the space race. Boosted by private companies, rapid technological innovations have made the once-impossible possible, such as reusable rockets self-landing vertically back on Earth. Most people can’t comprehend the current scope of spaceflight advancement, says Antonio Peronace, the executive director of Space for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that brings private citizens to space. “It’s truly science fiction,” he adds. Commercialized flights to space are already in operation, with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic successfully blasting off tourism rockets. In April, the Amazon billionaire’s partner, Lauren Sánchez, will lead pop star Katy Perry, CBS Mornings host Gayle King, and three other women into space on a New Shepard spacecraft — making it the first all-female flight crew since the Sixties. By the mid-2040s, Musk has said he hopes to establish a million-person-strong colony on Mars. It’s these companies’ hopes that within a few decades, going up into orbit could be as normal as taking a long-haul flight. Yet space travel is unfathomably costly. (Out of the roughly 700 people who have gone to space, only a fraction have been private citizens, according to a January analysis by Scientific American.) Only deep-pocketed enthusiasts can afford Virgin Galactic’s $600,000 price tag to be suspended in weightlessness for a few minutes. And beyond a refundable $150,000 deposit, Bezos won’t even disclose how much his ticket to space costs. Enter Maezawa. Like many tech billionaires, Maezawa is eccentric and slightly cringe — he’s constantly posting videos of himself on YouTube and perpetually coming up with kooky social media gimmicks. Playing in punk bands and going by the stage name You X Suck, Maezawa earned his wealth after giving up his drumsticks in the late Nineties to sell imported rare CDs and vinyl. By 2004, Maezawa expanded the venture and founded Zozotown, Japan’s largest online fashion retailer. But Maezawa has managed to come across as earnest and genuine in his mission for world peace and philanthropy, establishing the Contemporary Art Foundation in Tokyo and randomly giving away a billion yen, or $9.1 million, to his followers in 2020. He’s also gained a reputation as a serious rare-art collector. His personal archive boasts works by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yayoi Kusama, Yoshitomo Nara, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, and Richard Prince. (Particularly fond of Basquiat, Maezawa spent $110.5 million on a skull painting by the late artist in 2017 — the highest price sold at auction by an American artist.) Considering Maezawa’s dedication to the arts and his newfound curiosity around space travel, dearMoon seemed like a natural extension of his philanthropic efforts. Much like the artists who documented, contextualized, and criticized other monumental events through literature, music, photography, film, dance, and theater, Maezawa said he wanted artists to memorialize this moment, and believed exorbitant prices shouldn’t deprive them of the opportunity. This juncture of human inventiveness and sheer wonder, Maezawa felt, should be shared with the world. MORE THAN A DECADE AGO and 4,000 miles away from his current home in Iceland, nature photographer and conservationist Iliya was sitting up in a tree with a friend while attending the University of San Francisco. The two sipped cheap beers as the conversation drifted into plans for the future. Iliya’s friend spoke of making the Olympic track team. Iliya’s dreams were a little less grounded. “I told her that one day, I was going to photograph the Earth from the moon,” he says. “I had this idea: What would that be like to be standing on the moon and photographing, looking at the Earth, seeing everything? All of the people, all of the life?” As Iliya’s career progressed, his work took him to the depths of the sea, swimming alongside humpback whales in French Polynesia. It brought him to volcanic heights, capturing images of bubbling lava. His bucket-list destination was put out of mind until a decade after that late-night conversation, when he received a message from that same college friend. “She sent me the [dearMoon post and was] like, ‘Here’s your chance,’” he recalls. Every crew member had their own personal motivation for going to space. Adam spent her childhood growing up on a boat, knowing better than most how powerful the draw of the moon can be. After studying at Cambridge, she traveled to remote villages around the world to document humans and their relationships with natural landscapes, often through a sociopolitical lens. Going to space, to her, was less about the romanticism and wonder of the universe, but the inherently political battleground that space represents. “That was the beauty of it for me,” Adam, who is queer, explains. “The fact that it is this borderless place — it’s so ironic that the access points to get there are so highly policed by federal government. But once you’re there, there is no law against your existence.” Olympian Farrington recalls the moon being the lone bright light at night during her childhood living on a ranch in Idaho. Her diligence, dedication, and goal-oriented personality won her gold in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and the moon was her chance to set her sights on another seemingly unwinnable challenge. A motivational speaker, going to space would add another layer to Farrington’s personal story of life taking her to unexpected places after suffering an injury and a career-ending diagnosis months after clinching her Olympic medal. Choreographer Yemi A.D. dreamed of being an astronaut as a child in the Czech Republic. His fascination with sci-fi and futurism eventually seeped into his passion for innovation and finding new ways to communicate and understand one another through physical movement. To him, the moon represents a “celestial embodiment of intentional connection — like a delicate dance of receiving and sending messages, just as it reflects the sun’s light. “It also reminds me that dreams often emerge from darkness, and it’s up to us to fight for them to reach the light of day,” he adds. “Even if they seem as distant as the moon itself — unreachable — we’ve already proven that they are within our reach, if only we dare to believe.” Hall says he was struck by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s assessment that our world is created from stardust and we will eventually return to that same dust. “You feel so small, but you also feel so big and part of something that’s bigger than yourself,” he explains. “I think as a storyteller, I was so moved by looking at the night sky, thinking of generations of humans creating meaning out of the same thing.” Dodd’s casual curiosity about spaceflight and rocket engineering led him to leave his day job as a photographer in Iowa to pursue a full-time career of teaching rocket science on YouTube, with nearly 2 million subscribers. “I don’t think I’m as romantic about actual space as a lot of people are,” he admits. “I really like the engineering and the technology.” Helping the world understand this unprecedented moment of the new space race was part of Dodd’s dearMoon pitch. Much like Walter Cronkite, the universally trusted journalist who narrated the Apollo 11 mission as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humankind’s first steps on the moon, Dodd hoped he too could be a clear, unwavering voice helping guide Americans through a historic moment. “People lived through the Apollo program seeing [Cronkite]. He was at the launches, his studio shaking when the Saturn V was taking off, and [viewers] living vicariously through him. I pitched that: Let me help share this mission.” Artists capturing the beauty of space was not unique to dearMoon. One of the first photos the world collectively remembers of Earth came in December 1968, during Apollo 8’s pioneering orbit of the moon. Titled “Earthrise” by NASA astronaut William A. Anders, the image is wondrous. A marble-like planet emerges, bright and vivid, from vast nothingness. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders said of the photo in 1997. “And yet it was our home.” Still, the image was not taken by a renowned photographer, but a NASA astronaut. If creative artists, storytellers, documentarians, and photographers were granted the same opportunity, what would they be able to capture? What could they create that could help tell and preserve the story of humanity for centuries to come? “As soon as those dominoes start to fall, then the world’s going to change,” Space for Humanity’s Peronace says. “You’re going to find new innovation, new entrepreneurs, new adventurers and explorers everywhere popping up. Once we inspire more people to feel that they have permission to dream at that altitude, you’re going to see a real spike in what the species is able to accomplish.” Although NASA established an art program in 1962 that tapped the likes of Norman Rockwell, Robert McCall, Andy Warhol, and Annie Leibovitz to create “an artistic record” that would, as NASA put it, “give a unique insight into significant aspects of our history-making advances into space,” dearMoon would be the first privately funded project to physically send artists into space, around the moon for days on end. A million people rushed to apply when the project opened in March 2021. Week by week, the applicant pool shrank as Maezawa’s team put the hopefuls through a rigorous interview process. Artists submitted introductory videos, compiled portfolios of their work, and pitched what they would create if entrusted with a seat on the rocket. By the time they were brought to Houston that September, around a dozen people remained. Despite being the first time the applicants could size up their competition, the atmosphere was light amid the solo and group interviews. The creatives bonded over their respective work before Maezawa’s team threw open the doors to an adjoining room, where ping-pong tables with dearMoon-branded paddles awaited them. Randomly picking names out of a hat, the artists were divided into teams to see how long the pairing could volley. It was meant to be a friendly, low-stakes icebreaker; explained as an activity that Maezawa and his team frequently played together. Still, to the participants, it all seemed surreal. Two months after returning home from the trip, Maezawa surprised the lucky 10 crew members with a video call. They had been chosen to be part of the historic flight crew. “I had this rush in my mind, in my forehead, in my eyes. I was clapping and I started to dance in the room with no music,” recalls Yemi A.D. “I felt like I shrank into the eight-year-old Yemi — when I had the dream of flying to space, and when I decided to park the dream because it was unreachable. It connected who I am today and who I was as a child.” AN ELECTRIC ENERGY WAS PALPABLE in Boca Chica, Texas, on April 20, 2023. The once-sleepy Gulf Coast is home to Starbase — a SpaceX launch site that Musk recently named as the company’s new headquarters. It teemed with locals, news crews, rocket engineers, astronauts, and space enthusiasts, who had all gathered to witness a fully integrated Starship take its first orbital flight attempt. When fully operational, Musk has said he hopes to use Starships as a high-tech transportation system that will ferry both humans and cargo into space. As dearMoon crew members looked on — Maezawa skipped the launch after it was delayed three days — the craft easily attained its goal of clearing the launchpad before exploding 24 miles above sea level. While the launch was a success, many in the dearMoon crew were slightly unnerved to see their ride erupt into flames midair. “It was crazy to all of a sudden get your phone and everyone’s like, ‘It exploded. Are you nervous? Are you scared? Does this change your mind?’” Farrington says. There was another person who was taken aback by the explosion. Dodd says he was still reveling in the overall success of the attempt when one of Maezawa’s team members asked if he thought Starship would be ready for the dearMoon mission by the end of the year. Dodd was dumbfounded. “I almost couldn’t believe the question,” he says. The prototype exploded while still dozens of miles away from the Kármán line — the border of Earth’s atmosphere and space. The idea that within eight months, SpaceX engineers could not only launch Starship into orbit, but embark on a six-day journey around the moon and safely return to Earth was incredulous. Almost from the offset, Dodd said he had been warning his fellow crew members that dearMoon’s initial timeline for heading to space was way off. Considering that Maezawa should have a direct line to Musk, Dodd assumed Maezawa and his own team would be very much aware that 2023 was off the table and sometime around 2027 would be more realistic. “I’ll be surprised if another Starship flight happens this year,” Dodd says he told the dearMoon team member. “She’s like, shocked. I was like, ‘You know we’re not flying for years.’” INITIALLY, ADAM HAD BEEN CAUTIOUSLY wary of Maezawa and his lofty promises. “I have always been hypercritical of the motivation behind [any] project,” she explains. “With MZ, he felt like more of a safe bet because he seems to be into the spectacle. I was like, ‘OK, maybe the spectacle will always be the spectacle when it comes to space.’” In the lead-up to the cancellation, there wasn’t any solid reason for dearMoon crew members to doubt Maezawa’s commitment to the mission. As part of the interview process, he footed the bill for the dwindling group of applicants to have full medical screenings, including bone-density scans, MRIs, and echocardiograms. His team arranged for the crew to meet NASA workers, astronauts, and SpaceX engineers at global space stations. The crew were given personalized dearMoon sweaters and stickers. And when Maezawa visited the International Space Station in December 2021, some crew members were flown out to Kazakhstan to see him blast off in a Russian Soyuz rocket. Still, alarm bells began ringing for Adam when crew members were asked to sign contracts that included a non-disparagement agreement, certain ownership rights to the art they made for dearMoon, and a clause that put them on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars if they balked and withdrew from the mission. (All but two signed.) And there were certain hotel and expenditure invoices that went unpaid when Maezawa’s team organized last-minute trips, according to Adam. Plus, there didn’t seem to be a solidified plan of what would happen to some of the work that was created while in space. “I wanted to ensure longevity, to make sure that it was going to a museum or being looked after, not just in MZ’s personal collection,” Adam adds. “If I’m making a public record, it needs to be protected like a public record, yeah. That was really important to me.” Despite his infectious enthusiasm, Maezawa has a history of balking when it comes to executing his more ambitious projects. In January 2020, he announced a search for a girlfriend to travel to the moon with him. The search would be documented in a dating reality show, with Maezawa encouraging women who were at least 20 years old and wished for “world peace” to apply. By the end of the month — and after 27,000 submissions — he got cold feet and abandoned the project. His philanthropic dedication to the arts sometimes shouldn’t be taken at face value. “Rather than monetary or investment value, I felt I had a personal responsibility to take care of this masterpiece and preserve it for the next generation,” Maezawa said of a Basquiat painting he purchased in 2016, only to flip it years later and net $28 million. There were other possible warning signs. When Maezawa announced the trip in 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth hovered close to $3 billion. The following year, it nosedived to $1.8 billion after he suffered a costly gamble in the failed launch of Zozosuit, a tech-powered bodysuit that would allow shoppers to custom-fit clothes being sold by the company’s new private clothing line. Maezawa also admitted to losing $41 million in day trading stocks in 2020. His net worth stayed stagnant until dipping another $300 million in 2024. Perhaps Maezawa’s stay at the ISS quelled some of his excitement for space travel. Keen on attention, he vlogged the entire 12-day trip, floating around in a Santa Claus costume and attempting to accomplish 100 fan-picked tasks in zero gravity. Despite the early fanfare, Maezawa’s later subsequent ISS space videos didn’t seem to rack up the same millions of views on YouTube when compared with clips of Maezawa shopping for a mansion in Russia, purchasing a Rolls-Royce, or bidding for pastel-colored suits BTS members wore during the “Dynamite” music video. Musk’s priorities could have also shifted. In 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to have Starship land astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis Program, NASA’s lunar-exploration campaign. It meant that SpaceX engineers would have to pivot to prioritizing NASA’s goals versus those of private citizens. Musk also seems a bit spread thin. In addition to taking over Twitter in 2022, the South African billionaire is also running Tesla, Neuralink, and xAI. Most recently, Musk has embedded himself into President Trump’s administration with the creation of DOGE — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — where Musk-loyal cronies are gutting federal agencies at the same time Musk’s companies could receive lucrative government contracts. It likely didn’t help that well into 2023, SpaceX still didn’t have concrete timing on when Starship would be fully operational. Consecutive Starship launches in January and early March both ended in spectacular implosions. Daniel Dumbacher, a NASA Advisory Council Member, put it bluntly to Congress members in a hearing in February: “The probability of the United States safely landing humans on the moon by 2030, with the current plan, is remote at best.” In hindsight, it struck some dearMoon crew members as odd that Maezawa didn’t stay for the Starship launch. “That was pretty telling,” Dodd says. “He was probably pretty fed up and impatient at this point.” Then there was Musk unfollowing Maezawa on X in March 2024. But surely it had nothing to do with dearMoon’s future. “I put it to the side,” Iliya says. “I was like, ‘It’ll be fine. That would be absurd.’” HALL HAD BEEN UP LATE one night last spring working on a presentation about his life, career, and the dearMoon journey for a space summit when the email came in. Maezawa was calling off the entire project. “I read it and stared at a wall for about 20 minutes trying to just process what had happened,” Hall says. “There was one side of it immediately that was devastation, loss, definitely anger.” Yet also relief. “I felt a load being lifted off my shoulders. The safety of my life and my health was now, at least for this time, restored. [There was] also a feeling of [having] complete control over my life and how I work again.” Hall had been documenting every stage of the dearMoon experience, traveling around the world to meet with other participants and document their collective journeys. And this was another, yet unfortunate, arc in their stories. Wordlessly, Hall set up cameras and his audio equipment in his living room in the dark of the night, readying himself to tell his girlfriend, fellow filmmaker Gabriella Canal, in the morning. When she woke up, Hall sat her down on the couch and handed her a printout of the email. “I was also relieved — that was the first thing I felt, which I felt bad about,” Canal says. “But then I saw his little face, like big puppy eyes, and then I felt really sad for him. It was really a heartbreak. And then I was angry.” The other dearMoon participants were equally blindsided. Some crafted heartfelt pleas to Maezawa, asking him to reconsider. But there was no budging. On June 1, Maezawa announced he was pulling the plug. “Without clear schedule certainty in the near-term, it is with a heavy heart that Maezawa made the unavoidable decision to cancel the project,” he said in a statement. “To all who have supported this project and looked forward to this endeavor, we sincerely appreciate it and apologize for this outcome. Although dearMoon is canceled, Maezawa and dearMoon crew members will continue to challenge themselves in their respective fields. We will hold deep respect for SpaceX as they continue to venture into uncharted territories, while we ourselves will move on to the next challenge.” For the crew members Rolling Stone spoke to, it was a stinging blow. “It was like I went through a breakup,” Farrington says. “I was on cloud nine and it just got taken away from me. I’ve been through that before, when I won an Olympic gold medal and eight months later I found out I had to retire due to an injury. It was kind of a similar feeling to that, like ‘Oh, no, what’s next for me?’” A heartbroken Yemi A.D. uploaded a vulnerable video to YouTube, explaining the cancellation. “I wanted to show face, because I realized that I celebrate my successes — I go online, I say ‘I won this award, I won this medal, I won this.’ And people celebrate that, but then I was like, ‘OK, am I strong enough to not celebrate, but to be there, to be present?’ It didn’t, in the end, feel at all like failure, but it felt like something that I needed to learn,” he says. With their professional reputations on the line, some crew members had to make awkward phone calls to their creative partners. Others were hit financially. Hall says he depleted his personal savings to fund preproduction for the documentary he was making about the mission. “I was already entirely investing myself into a dream,” he says. “DearMoon put a financial strain on me that I’m still recovering from. I regret none of it, and my career has gone to places because of this project that I wouldn’t trade for anything. But at the same time, I’d be remiss not to mention just how difficult that side has been.” Adam, who said she was similarly left with debt from research and developing special camera equipment for the mission, made an appeal directly to Maezawa. The irony was not lost on Adam that art-collector Maezawa was “willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on dead artists, but not willing to invest in our work while we are alive.” She put together a deck proposal for how Maezawa could establish a grant program for some of the artists to continue their projects or at least recoup some losses. He declined. “That is how you create legacy,” Adam says. “It’s not through buying a Basquiat and speculating on it like it’s Bitcoin. It’s not a toy. If you actually care about artistic production, put your money where your mouth is.” Since the cancellation, Maezawa’s interests seemed to have refocused on celebrity golfing tournaments and Formula 1 racing. Last month, he posted back-to-back videos showing off his two specially ordered new supercars, including the Bugatti Tourbillon. “Most expensive ever,” was the title of the YouTube video that racked up 1.3 million views. “It has once again broken the highest price in Maezawa’s supercar collection.” IN A ROOM OF ADMIRING black-tied guests, Yemi A.D. stood on a raised podium in December as interactive visuals swirled around him on the walls of an event space in New York’s Meatpacking District. The immersive experience was to honor the nominees of the Moonshot Platform’s second annual awards, a nonprofit organization that Yemi A.D. launched before he even knew if he was going to be selected for his journey to space. Why wait on the unknown to go after a dream, when there was something to be done now, on Earth. “I feel everybody should have their moon shot,” he says. The program gives mentorship and grants to young activists and innovators who have launched projects aimed at bettering their communities and the world. Chantale Zuzi, who escaped the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is now a refugee advocate, was honored with the night’s resilience award; Czech high schooler Simon Klinga, whose laser-powered satellite-restarting system will be tested aboard a Falcon9 spacecraft, won the Moonshot Idea Award; and Stanley Anigbogu, whose startup LightEd Impact converts plastic and electronic waste into solar-power energy in rural communities in Africa, took home the Moonshot Learning prize. A total of $50,000 was given out to 10 recipients. As Yemi A.D. channeled his dearMoon rejection through his foundation, others are also navigating how to tell their stories. Adam turned the entire disorienting experience into Rhi-Entry, a multidisciplinary work illustrating her frustrations and reimagining what reality could have looked like for her. Hall is sitting on nearly 100 hours of footage from the application process, including interviews with his fellow crew members, capturing their lives before the mission. Almost all are still holding out hope for someone else to pick up Maezawa’s torch, to turn a once far-off dream back into a reality. Farrington jokes that no one should be surprised if she pops back up in Boca Chica, angling for someone to give her a ride to space. The majority of the dearMoon crew stayed close friends, as the decision left them part of an infinitesimally small group of people who nearly broke the Earth’s atmosphere, only to be met with loss and a slight sting of embarrassment. A few tried rationalizing that they’d always end back on Earth and create art born out of the otherworldly experience, the only variable being what would happen in between liftoff and touchdown. For the crew, the moon still is a dual reminder of promise and loss. “Every time I would look up at the moon, I would have this flood of feelings, all these dreams that opened up,” Iliya says. But for a spell after the cancellation, he could barely tilt his head upward at night. It felt jarring that something that “has been a source of inspiration for people since awareness came about” held an entirely different meaning for him. But he laughs and says, “I thought, this is ridiculous. I cannot look at the moon and put any anger or disappointment at the moon. It’s not the moon’s fault.”