AN ARTIST FROM Co Cork has said she is “devastated” over the cancellation of a flyby mission to the moon which she was going to be a passenger on. 

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced this morning that the ‘Dear Moon’ mission will not be going ahead. 

Rhiannon Adam, a photographer and artist originally from Co Cork and is currently living in London, was going to be one of the crew onboard the SpaceX rocket, alongside several celebrities from across the world. 

She was going to be the first Irish person to ever go to space. 

The funder of the project said he had to pull out due to uncertainty around the feasibility of the mission – as the circumlunar flight was first slated for take off by the end of last year.  

“To say I’m devastated would be an understatement. This is such a missed opportunity – to provide some hope, to encourage others to dream,” Adam said on X this morning. 

“I still love space and I am passionate about the importance of sending artists and writers to experience the overview effect. We need it. The first men to see the moon at close range – the Apollo 8 astronauts – called for poets in space. That still has never happened, but I hope that with the rapid advances in space technology, that the dream will happen,” she added. 

It’s a missed opportunity to do something bigger. What dearMoon represented was bigger than an individual. And with that came responsibility that has now been dropped. We need to do better. An individual ended it for individual reasons.

— Rhiannon Adam (@blackbirdsfly) June 1, 2024

Maezawa was the first private passenger to go on one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX missions. 

Adam was critical of his decision to cancel the mission at this stage, saying that dreams had been “shattered” and two years of the crew’s lives had been “wasted” because he wanted to “move on”. 

She said that he could have redirected the funding towards relief efforts or supporting tech innovation and artists in a different way.

Adam said that she applied to go to the moon because she wanted “an adventure”. 

“I was born in Ireland which will make me the first Irish person in space, which is an incredible honour,” Adam said when she was first announced as a crew member for the flyby mission. 

Today, she said she hasn’t given up on her dream of going to space, though she is currently experiencing a form of “grief”.