Massoud and his brother spent five years and roughly a million euros of their own money building a 50-foot bronze Prometheus statue for SpaceX's Starbase. They welded thousands of bronze plates by hand with sub-millimetre precision, worked nights with a tiny crew, and now face a €2,000 shortfall to finish.
What day is today?
Uh, I have no idea.
We are at Starbase, near the side of the road. In a few days, we will have our statue of Prometheus. At 50 feet, I feel like Starbase is a place of dreams. Back in the day when they built Paris, it was really about unifying all those different energy like science, progress, technique, and art and beauty. And today. There is a place on Earth where they build magical objects that are going to space and come back. That's incredible.
Every legendary city at its entrance has some epic monument to welcome the people arriving so they feel something. They feel intimidated. So this is made of a lot of bronze plates. We weld them together just on little points. And now little by little, we have to make all the plates get in the perfect position.
And when it's like perfectly smooth, like it's kind of a work of craftsmanship, like we have to find the exact, like it's even less than a millimeter of precision. And then we have to put some points of welding. And then when everything is good, then we can put the real welding work and weld everything together.
So it's going well, but it's difficult. It's really difficult. Like, we're used to work in a certain context, and here we have nothing. So we have to, like, find everything we need. We have, like, All the team is not here, so it's, uh, we're just a few of us. And the heat, the heat is something. How late do you guys usually work in the night? It's cooler in the night, so maybe like 3, 4 AM.
We hope that in the distant future they will find those gigantic statues and they will think high of our time.
So I was doing computer science in Paris and my brother went to the south of France. He began making like small statues and I was not really paying attention to it. My brother told me, you should come for like 2 weeks for a vacation. So he was with a few friends And like the project was really starting and he said, okay, we need help. Can you help us just for a few days? So I began to help doing like what was needed. One week passes, two weeks passes, and I just felt like I couldn't leave the situation like this. Like they needed my help. So I stayed a little more, a little more. And then I understand that my brother had a Machiavellian plan. To capture me. So I end up staying and it was like 5 years ago.
And so we focused on speed. We developed a lot of techniques to be very, very fast. And so we did this in 1 month. But the thing is, we had no money left to come and install it. So we had to work for a few months to earn money and to come here and finally install it.
Like everything here for the statue is like Like one million. It was from our own money.
Comment ça se passe?
C'est de la merde, mais ça va.
Le quoi?
Bah, on a perdu un sachet avec plein de matériel, donc faut galérer pour bricoler des trucs de merde.
Vous l'avez perdu sur ce terrain vague?
Ouais, mais peut-être qu'ils l'ont pris dans l'Ohio, on sait pas. Of course, we need to have, we need to make money, but on this project, it's something that we we dream about for so long that. We we just want to make it happen.
Donc pour revenir au travail, donc Massoud vous dites qu'il manque 1000 euros.
Il manque 2000 euros.
Il manque 2000 euros mais c'est terrible.
C'est pas super.
Et quel est l'espoir de les avoir Bah le virement qu'on attend de 250. Ça, ça a l'air incroyable, non?
Bah, apparemment.
Do you know what is this?
Lunch.
It tastes like some product to clean the floor. Like a statue, for me, it's the voice of the dead. It will really connect you with the will from the past. And I am very much for progress, and I absolutely think that to keep progress alive, We have to be connected with the long queue of time because it gives us a meaning.
It gives us a direction to go toward. Like if we look back to history, we see that there is a line. There is a continuity, and there is a direction that people for thousands of years. Have sacrificed themselves to push. If we don't care about history, we don't feel the— we don't know that many people pushed us so hard and died so we can keep pushing for the future. It's so hard to to grasp how much they bring to humanity, Elon Musk and SpaceX. So we wanted to be installed in Starbase because it's the place on Earth that pushes the boundaries in the most spectacular way. This place will be one of the most important places in human history. We want the aesthetics and the epicness of this place to match its historical significance. What if Starbase doesn't want this?
I think they will want it. The statue is epic.
