Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX will launch a moon mission next year that will be funded by cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

The SpaceX founder said that the satellite – aptly titled Doge-1 – would be the “first crypto in space” and the “first meme in space”.

The announcement was made on Twitter yesterday (May 9), and caused the price of Dogecoin to immediately surge by more than 30 per cent. It was accompanied by a music video for “Dogecoin Song – to the Moon” by YouTuber Herr Fuchs, which plays on the idea of investors saying that they want to send Dogecoin’s value “to the Moon”. 

Dogecoin had previously plummeted from an all-time high after Musk’s controversial guest appearance on Saturday Night Live on Saturday (May 8), following a segment in which he joked about Dogecoin being a “hustle” (watch it here).

Musk has previously said he would put “a literal dogecoin on the literal moon”, which also caused the price to briefly shoot up. He regularly tweets Dogecoin memes and even refers to himself as the “Dogefather”.

“Dogecoin, a currency based off the shiba inu meme from 2013, is now being used as a currency for space travel,” tweeted crypto portfolio app Blockfolio following the announcement. “That confirms it, we indeed live in a simulation.”

Musk immediately responded to this with laughing face emojis, having previously argued that there is an extremely high probability that we are living in a simulation. “There’s a billion to once chance we’re living in base reality,” he said in 2016.

However, the Doge-1 mission isn’t the first time that someone has promised to send Dogecoin “to the Moon”. Game and software developer Joe Frusetta plans to send a physical representation of a dogecoin to the moon later this year, in coordination with Google Lunar XPrize winner Astrobotic.

Of course, none of this unhinged behaviour is particularly surprising for Musk, who previously crowned himself the Technoking of Tesla. The billionaire also wants to send humans to Mars by 2026, despite warning that “a bunch of people will probably die” in the beginning stages of the process.