Spreading Christianity around the world has been a centuries-old mission for the devout, but one man has a higher calling — about 238,855 miles higher.
For roughly a year, Justin Park of Arlington, Va., has made it his mission to place a 7.5-foot, aluminium-titanium alloy cross on, you guessed it, the moon.
But in reality, the 43-year-old’s heavenly ambitions are weighed down by a very earthly problem: money. Park founded the Cross on the Moon Coalition and has raised just $227,000 of the roughly $40 million needed. That led him to shrink the cross design from two stories tall to the current size.
Now he’s placing his hopes in billionaire Peter Thiel — a Christian who has invested in space startups and is running a lecture series on the Antichrist in San Francisco — to bankroll his moonshot. (The Standard first met Park on Sept. 15, while he stood in line at the Commonwealth Club for the first of Thiel’s four lectures.)
“He could be the rock this project needs,” Park said of the billionaire.
Park’s idea to put a memorial to Jesus Christ on the moon was a confluence of his interests in science and religion.
It stems from watching Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” TV show during his undergraduate years in the early aughts, when he studied computer science at the University of Northern Iowa. The idea came to Park after a 2018 dream in which his mother, who died of breast cancer when he was a teenager, visited him as an angel.
After talking to friends about that dream, he realized he wanted to build something tangible to memorialize his faith.
“I think God is leading us into space. From a philosophical standpoint, that’s what the cross on the moon is about,” Park said. “He’s saving us by leading us into the cosmos.”
Why does he need so much money?
The cost of delivering the payload is, well, astronomical. Placing a kilogram of anything into orbit around the moon costs $300,000, but landing the same amount of stuff on the moon costs a whopping $1.2 million, according to Astrobotic, a company that makes lunar landers and rovers.
In Park’s plan, the cross would sit on a lunar lander and unfold to its full height. But even with a telescope, you couldn’t see the monument (though God might). The project would be livestreamed from the moon for earthly enjoyment.
Other than donating two bitcoins of his own — worth around $225,000 — to the heavenly cause, Park has raised just $2,000 from donations and merchandise in the past year. His actual career is making educational video games about space and Christianity, but that hasn’t been profitable in 13 years, he said.
Given the poor financial state of his project, Park is evaluating his options. He could make the cross smaller: a 1-footer would cost $5 million. He’s even considered putting a communion wafer, which weighs a much more cost-effective gram, on the moon instead.
He’s betting that a road trip this fall to 50 U.S. congregations with a folding, full-scale sheet-metal model of the cross will raise cash for the astral pilgrimage.
As for his pitch to Thiel?
“Unfortunately, I didn’t hear from Peter. But I’ll probably come out to San Francisco for the finale,” he said Wednesday, referring to the final Antichrist lecture, set for Oct. 6.