The Frenchmen Who Built A 50-Foot Prometheus To Flirt With Elon Musk

“THE PEOPLE of Starbase, they are at the forefront of humanity’s progress,” Missor Movahed told me as we leaned against wooden crates. “When Victor Hugo, the French writer, died, we had a huge procession inside Paris with his tombeau going through the Champs-Élysées… Two million people. And I think the people from Starbase deserve [this] kind of gratitude.”

As I ingested Missor’s words, a nearby semi truck kicked up a cloud of dust that stuck to my sweat covered body. We were standing in a gravel lot next to the two-lane highway that leads to Starbase, a chunk of land at the southernmost tip of Texas where Elon Musk and SpaceX launch giant rockets to space.

Hanging from a small crane behind Missor was a bronze statue of Prometheus, the Greek titan said to have stolen fire from the Gods and delivered it to mankind. Only the head and torso had been assembled, the legs were strewn nearby. The arms, raising his famous torch, had not yet been delivered.

“The French did the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the value of liberty and truth and basically the value of the West,” Missor continued, stroking his long, black beard while he considered his words. “I feel like we are doing the same thing with a little scale. But I feel like that’s the same will.”

Missor is the founder of the Atelier Missor, a French sculpture foundry. I often watched him making phone calls or barking orders in French rather than welding the statue himself. Most people notice the Atelier’s matching uniforms — dark grey slacks, white collared shirts, brown boots, suspenders — and Missor’s outfit was always the cleanest. In Texas, the getup got a rare new addition: matching cowboy hats.

As I examined Missor’s face, I decided two things. First, he’s totally bonkers in a quixotic, melodramatic, possible cult leader, freedom-loving, dude just chasing his calling kind of way. Second, despite the Renaissance-era wardrobe, he’s possibly none of the above and is really mostly a normal dude more or less hiding inside a costume of what a serious sculptor is supposed to look like. I imagined him back in Paris watching the French equivalent of Fox News in basketball shorts and a T-shirt.