When most musicians talk about a “final show”, they mean a stadium, a festival, maybe a DVD. Dave Mustaine is thinking several hundred thousand kilometers further.
In a recent conversation with Metal Hammer, the Megadeth leader laid out a vision for the band’s goodbye that feels more like Apollo 18 than your standard farewell run: “I hope we’ll be playing up in space,” he said, imagining a send-off that literally leaves Earth behind. “I think that will be a really fitting climax. And I’m not talking about on the side of a vomit comet. A gig on the moon, a full moon landing, that would be cool.”
If that sounds like classic Mustaine — half mad scientist, half thrash lifer — it’s also very much in step with where the billionaire space race is heading. We’ve already watched pop culture’s elite strap in: pop superstar Katy Perry, “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, and British billionaire Richard Branson have all taken their own brief trips beyond the atmosphere in recent years.
Mustaine has been watching that shift closely: “I saw they sent up a bunch of celebrities into space and I thought ‘Well, if them, why not me?’, you know? I’m just watching how that all progresses. I know Elon Musk and Richard Branson were working on interstellar travel. I think people are going to be travelling to space a lot sooner than you think.”
Coming from anyone else, the idea of a moon-stage might sound like trolling. But when Metal Hammer pressed him on whether he was actually serious about a gig in orbit, Mustaine doubled down: “People already travel over 40,000 feet altitude, and when you get to that kind of atmosphere, you’re basically already in space. So I do think it’s going to happen. The question is, are people going to be able to inhabit the moon?”
For a metal audience, it’s tempting to dismiss all this as sci-fi fantasy. Yet the line between fantasy and reality has been getting thinner. This past April, Katy Perry boarded Jeff Bezos‘s Blue Origin rocket alongside five other women. In an 11-minute flight, the capsule carried the singer, Bezos‘ now-wife Lauren Sánchez, and CBS presenter Gayle King more than 100km (around 62 miles) above the planet, crossing the internationally accepted border of space and giving them a short taste of weightlessness. At one point, after looking back at the planet from above, Perry even sang “What A Wonderful World”.
And she’s far from the only artist to eye the stars. Over the last decade, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Lance Bass have all, at one time or another, tried to be the first performer to take their music off-world. The difference is that Mustaine isn’t talking about a one-off stunt for social media — he’s talking about the last chapter of Megadeth’s story.
All this cosmic talk is wrapped around something much more grounded: the end of a thrash institution. In a new interview with U.K. magazine Kerrang!, Dave Mustaine confirmed that Megadeth are preparing a “farewell” tour, set to launch in 2026. The trek has a fittingly reflective name: the “This Was Our Life” tour, a nod to more than forty years of riffing, political venom, and personal catharsis.
For fans, the word “farewell” can mean anything from “last lap” to “see you in five years”. Mustaine does give a rough timescale — and it’s not short: “We’re easily talking about touring for another three to five years,” Dave said. That would stretch the band’s goodbye well into the second half of the decade.
He knows exactly what that means for him personally: “And if we’re going to be doing it for that long, then, shit, I’ll be looking at the birthday I don’t even want to think about,” he added, fully aware he turns 70 in 2031.
There’s a different tone in his voice now than in the classic days of endless touring. This is a man who’s crawled out of some very dark places. He’s kicked drugs and alcohol. He’s stared down throat cancer — the kind of diagnosis that could have easily ended his career, if not his life. That history hangs over every plan he makes for Megadeth’s long goodbye.
As he puts it himself: “I’m not caught up in longevity and stuff like that, and being one of those guys who can play until he’s in his 80s. I have to remember that people live and they die. And I need to take good care of myself.”
