Rhiannon Adam photographed Starship vehicle break apart four minutes after liftoff

Rhiannon Adam watched and photographed SpaceX’s Integrated Flight Test 1 vehicle break apart four minutes after liftoff from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on 20 April 2023, from the VIP viewing area on South Padre Island. Adam said, “Wow, the risks are no longer theoretical. I could have been on that.” The raptor engines wrecked the concrete launchpad and tower, producing a dust cloud, and debris landed on local houses, leaving residents to wipe dust off their windows.

SpaceX closed Starbase for four months after the explosion to carry out a clean-up and reconstruction.

Adam had been chosen in 2021 as one of eight civilians in an open call for a no-cost SpaceX Starship trip around the Moon backed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. The dearMoon project would have sent Maezawa and eight civilian artists on a lunar flyby around the Moon aboard Starship. The crew, including Adam and Brendan Hall, was revealed on 8 December 2022.

One million candidates applied to or joined the selection process by 2021, with Maezawa revealing the number in a video on 16 July 2021. Hall said he competed against artists and creatives from 150 countries, including widely published photographers, a famous choreographer, a prominent online educator, an Olympic champion snowboarder, a Korean pop singer, a well-known DJ and an Indian TV actor. At selection, just 24 white American men had previously orbited or touched down on the Moon. Hall wrote in winter 2022 that dearMoon would be the first civilian lunar mission, sending eight artists around the Moon.

Hall traveled to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, to watch Maezawa launch to the International Space Station on Maezawa’s first private space mission. He met SpaceX’s highest executives and stood underneath the engines of the nearly 400-foot Starship. The crew bonded at Boca Chica test launches, riding bumper cars and drinking morning beers in taco shops. Hall used personal funds to film a documentary featuring ballet in Prague, swimming with humpback whales in Tonga and exploring the Salton Sea with Adam.

The dearMoon crew received an email invitation to a Zoom call in mid-2024 and were told the project was not continuing, on a call framed as disappointment no bigger than a favorite TV show being cancelled. Crew members called Maezawa’s cancellation unilateral and hasty, said they were not consulted, and said they would rather wait for Starship to be ready. They also said it lacked transparency around the possibility of cancellation. Hall said it was not a reflection on the crew or on SpaceX’s commitment to fly them safely, and that the crew was ready to wait as long as it took.

Maezawa cancelled dearMoon on 1 June 2024 because of delays in SpaceX’s Starship development. The project had initially been scheduled to launch in 2023 and was later delayed before the cancellation. Hall said SpaceX’s open schedule seemed optimistic, first aiming at 2023 and then moving later as early test flights occurred.

Adam said dearMoon had become her whole identity, that she still dreamed about it every night, and that the cancellation obliterated her career as she knew it. She called the project a poisoned chalice. People stopped commissioning her photography because they assumed she was busy going to space, and every conversation she had was about dearMoon.

Adam is 5ft 2in, describes herself as gobby, messy and queer, and grew up on a sailing boat. She was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1985. She said growing up on a sailing boat in a tin can with blackness above and below was the closest thing on Earth to going to space. She wanted to change how people collectively feel about who is selected to go to space and to break the mould of the chiselled-jaw GI Joe lookalike astronaut stereotype.

She said dearMoon was also about exploring debates around the colonization and ownership of space, who has the right to explore it, and who crafts the collective future. Her photograph from the explosion is part of her Rhi-Entry project, which she describes as a modern-day tragic cycle using the Icarus metaphor and moving through bathos, pathos and hamartia.

Adam’s photograph is featured in the Rhi-Entry exhibition at the International Centre for the Image in Dublin until 23 December, and her work is part of Space at Fotografiska Tallinn until 17 January. Her book Polaroid: The Missing Manual is published by Thames and Hudson.

Hall and his partner Gaby had been together for six years when he told her of the cancellation, and she said it was the biggest journey of his life and would be one of hers too. Hall said Gaby told him, “this was the biggest journey of your life, so it was going to be one of mine too.” He said it was hard to stay patient and keep their lives on hold, but the crew was tough. He said dearMoon felt like being Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, with awe reaching elementary schools, his 95-year-old grandfather, and strangers from Marlborough, CT to India, Nigeria and Ireland.

Hall said benefactors who use their power to send artists to space should have the courage to see projects through, and that artists will still go to space and one day travel around and on the Moon. He said he still carries the dream of going to space and traveling around the Moon as a filmmaker. dearMoon involved no scientific experiments; the crew was expected to create artworks inspired by the lunar trip.

SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy booster constitute the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. The first uncrewed Starship test flight in April 2023 failed to reach space, and the second test flight in November 2023 flew higher but also failed. A fourth Starship test flight in June 2024 reached orbital velocity and successfully landed in the Indian Ocean.