Photographer Rhiannon Adam, selected for a civilian lunar mission, watched a SpaceX test flight explode in April 2023, an event she now says marked the beginning of the end of the project that had taken over her life.
Adam was one of eight civilians chosen in 2021 from an open call to fly around the Moon on a free SpaceX Starship flight funded by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. The dearMoon Project included Adam and another photographer. At the time, only 24 white American men had orbited or landed on the Moon, and being selected changed her life and her perception of her worth in the world.
A Pivotal Day in April
The flight, originally scheduled for 2023, completely took over Adam's life. She said it took the air out of every room, and every conversation she had was about it. People stopped commissioning her because they assumed she was busy going to space.
On 20 April 2023, Adam was in the VIP section of SpaceX's launch viewing area on South Padre Island, Texas, looking towards Boca Chica, a nature reserve near the Mexican border that is home to SpaceX's Starbase launchpad. They were there to watch SpaceX's Integrated Flight Test 1. After four minutes, following a relatively successful liftoff, the vehicle experienced what is known in space terms as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly and broke apart in the air.
Adam recalled thinking: "Wow, the risks are no longer theoretical. I could have been on that." The dust cloud in her photograph emerged from the concrete launchpad and tower, obliterated by the power of the raptor engines. The debris ended up all over local houses, and SpaceX closed the launch facility for reconstruction for four months while conducting a huge clean-up operation.
The End of dearMoon
Unbeknown to Adam, this photograph marked the beginning of the end of dearMoon. Maezawa had gone back to Japan after the first launch attempt had been scrubbed the day before and so missed this launch. Eventually, in mid-2024, all the participants received an email invite to a Zoom call and were told the project was not continuing.
Adam described the news as completely flooring. "This wasn't just a project – it had become my whole identity," she said. "It was a poisoned chalice and it obliterated my career as I knew it."
Rhi-Entry Project
The photograph is now part of Adam's Rhi-Entry project, which she describes as her version of a modern-day tragic cycle, with herself as Icarus who flew too close to the sun and whose wings melted. The exhibition combines the visual tropes of the space museum, bringing together facts and fiction, with her personal story as its spine.
Adam said all of her work is about calling out structural abuses of power, and she was blinded by the wild promise of an almost impossible dream. She wanted to change how people collectively feel about who is selected to go to space, noting she is a 5ft 2in, gobby, messy queer who grew up on a sailing boat. She wanted to break the mould of the untouchable superhero astronaut and explore ideas around the colonisation and ownership of space.
Rhi-Entry is at the International Centre for the Image in Dublin until 23 December. Adam's work is also part of Space @ Fotografiska Tallinn until 17 January. Her book Polaroid: The Missing Manual is published by Thames and Hudson.
