The last time fashionistas saw a rocket lifting off was at the very end of Chanel's A/W 17 runway, almost a year ago. The Chanel rocket lifted into the catwalk venue, reaching its ceiling and eventually stopping, around it people cheered and clapped, their mobile phones raised hoping to get a glimpse of the fashion marvel they were witnessing and of space cadet Karl Lagerfeld.
The last time the rest of the world cheered at a rocket launch was yesterday when images and footage broadcast all over the world showed the Falcon Heavy, built by SpaceX, the company founded and run by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, thunderously roaring and blasting off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
SpaceX signed a 20-year lease with NASA for the use of LC-39A in 2014; LC-39A supported the first Saturn V launch (Apollo 4) and Apollo 11, which sent the first humans to the surface of the moon.
Videos showing the Falcon Heavy in a cloud of dust were enough to dispel memories of the fake Chanel rocket and to make you realise that, in the vast universe surrounding us, fashion as we came to know it, with all its desperate celebrities, self-centred influencers and Instagrammable moments, is more or less terribly useless, or rather, utterly irrelevant.
Falcon Heavy proved instead mesmering: following booster separation, its two side cores perfectly landed at SpaceX's Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
The center core missed instead the droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean and fell into the water, destroying two of its thrusters. Though in this case the core missed its target, being a test flight, the outcome was still useful to gather critical data.
While demonstration missions like this one typically carry steel or concrete blocks as mass simulators, SpaceX carried a much more elegant cargo - a midnight-cherry Roadster built by Musk's other company, Tesla.
The words "Don’t Panic" were clearly visible on the dashboard (a reference to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and David Bowie's "Space Oddity" played on the speakers (by the way, how much do you have to pay a musician to play their music in the universe?).
A passenger, a dummy in a sleek SpaceX spacesuit - promptly rechristened Starman - sat behind the wheel of the sports car that was placed into a Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun. The vehicle is expected to orbit the sun for hundreds of millions of years.
The most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, the Falcon Heavy has the ability to lift into orbit nearly 64 metric tons, a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel.
This was the first time a rocket this powerful has been sent into space by a private company rather than a government space agency.
SpaceX's final goal is to enable people to live on other planets such as Mars, but the cost of travelling to space has to lower and the best way to do this is to reuse some parts of the rockets. Commercial planes cost a lot, but they fly around the world multiple times a day, while a rocket can only fly once.
SpaceX rockets can instead withstand reentry, successfully land back on Earth and fly again, so they are cheaper, even though they are still extremely expensive (the Falcon Heavy launch cost $90m).
As you may imagine there are some pros and cons attached to such a mission: it may be cool and ironic to think about a car floating in space for millions of years (unless it crashes on Earth...), but, though fun, it sounds like the surrealist prank of a billionaire with a vast ego. Since 2010, SpaceX has been sending the smaller Falcon 9 rocket into orbit, deploying satellites and carrying cargo to crews aboard the International Space Station, so Falcon Heavy may have carried something more useful.
Besides, this is an experiment (perfectly covered online via high definition live cams to raise our collective attention) that opens up questions about a future monopoly of space (is it possible to monopolise the universe? Shouldn't it belong to all human beings? Who will finally send colonists to a galaxy far away - Musk, Robert D. Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express, or Blue Origin, financed by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon?). SpaceX is indeed interested in offering exclusive journeys in the universe and possibly build a new space station above the moon.
Yet, it is also possible to read between the lines of this mission in more positive ways and consider the technology behind the rocket with innovative achievements that allowed the cores to land, such as grid fins, cold-gas thrusters and landing legs.
Besides, SpaceX's reusability program points at recycling and, while the car in space is an egomaniacal publicity stunt, it could also be interpreted as an ironic twist, proving that, as Musk himself stated in a press conference, crazy things can come true.
So, in many ways, the mission put under the spotlight the ambition of space racers, the enthusiasm of space fans and the dreams of explorers (ex-astronaut and, more recently, fashion model Buzz Aldrin also witnessed the launch).
Falcon Heavy's launch also propels more fashion dreams into orbit offering new potential to the fans of André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin's Space Age designs.
SpaceX will indeed need a team of people specialised in innovative textiles to provide spacesuits and staff uniforms, so they will have to start working on such aspects with fashion and textile designers.
Time will tell if in future space rocket staff will wear uniforms in a Space Odyssey style, but, if you're a fashion designer, leave superficiality to the fashionistas and poseurs and focus on other and more technological aspects. It may be too early to think about a Mars Fashion Week, but there's materials, fabrics and textiles to experiment with, not to mention accessories and mission logos to work on.
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