Jeff Koons! And Elon Musk! Sending art to the moon! Who cares!

Jeff Koons is the world’s second-most expensive living artist and, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. Both have been publicly denounced as “repulsive” and “vacuous” little men. And now, they have something else in common – together, they’re making history by sending art to the moon!

Yes, in the latest development of humankind’s quest to return to the moon, Koons has cooked up some little models of the moon to be carried on board Odysseus, a lunar lander developed by the US company Intuitive Machines. Titled Jeff Koons: Moon Phases – just in case you forgot whose big brain was behind the project – the artwork consists of 125 one-inch stainless steel balls, each representing a phase of the moon as seen from Earth and space. These are housed in a transparent cube designed by 4space and built from sustainable materials, although that seems like a fairly arbitrary distinction since it was loaded on board Odysseus and blasted into space on one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets.

Each of the Jeff Koons: Moon Phases models is also named after a famous and influential world-historical figure, like Plato, David Bowie, Artemisia Gentileschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Ada Lovelace, Hellen Keller, or Gandhi (it’s what he would have wanted). In this way, according to PACE Gallery, the artist “honours some of the greatest achievements of the past to inspire future generations”. These “inspirational” objects are twinned with larger iterations, which will remain here on Earth.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: “Please say that each stainless steel ‘moon’ pair comes with an NFT-based counterpart to ‘cultivate connections between the digital and physical worlds.’” Of course it does! Launched on February 15 (alongside the actual moon mission) each NFT includes an image of the corresponding artwork, alongside other, unspecified images and – most importantly – Jeff Koons’s “iconic” signature, which is sure to join names like Plato and Gandhi in inspiring our spacefaring offspring for generations to come.

It should be noted that Jeff Koons isn’t the first person to think of sending art to the moon. Last year, Dazed talked to the physicist and entrepreneur Samuel Peralta about The Lunar Codex, his arduous – and not-for-profit – effort to send the work of more than 30,000 artists, filmmakers, writers, and musicians to the lunar surface as a time capsule for “future human travellers”. Unfortunately, NASA’s Peregrine lander, which was carrying the first digitised Lunar Codex payload, crashed back to Earth a few months later, after suffering a propellant leak.

The Intuitive Machines moon mission itself is groundbreaking, however, as the first ever private lunar landing. As of writing, Odysseus is circling the moon in preparation for its landing, which is due to take place on February 22, no sooner than 10:30pm (UK time). Let’s hope that it doesn’t go the way of a Jeff Koons balloon dog, and explode into hundreds of pieces on impact.