Major League Cricket: will a $120m moonshot find success in America?

It was an obvious place to launch a sporting moonshot – a cricket league that can survive and thrive in America.

Last week, Space Center Houston hosted a reveal of next-generation spacesuits for a lunar mission. A few days later its main hall was crowded with cricketers wearing gaudy baseball caps in the colours of their new teams as the latest attempt to bring professional cricket to the US held its domestic player draft.

With the first overall pick, the Seattle Orcas of Major League Cricket (MLC) selected an all-rounder: 30-year-old Harmeet Singh, captain of the minor-league Seattle Thunderbolts and a member of the India squad that won the 2012 under-19 World Cup.

Four years after taking three wickets for England in their World Cup final win over New Zealand, Liam Plunkett will bowl for the San Francisco Unicorns. A domestic player because he lives in the Philadelphia area with his American wife, the 37-year-old was chosen in the second round.

Beaming in a suit jacket, white trainers and an orange Unicorns cap, Plunkett posed for the cameras next to the Mission Mars exhibit, a bulbous silvery spacecraft dangling from the ceiling above his head as pop music and a variegated array of glowing lights lent the event a novel atmosphere: sports meets disco meets STEM.

Not quite the Long Room at Lord’s. But the inaugural MLC season will boast international talent worthy of the sport’s most hallowed venues. Among Plunkett’s fellow Unicorns are the former New Zealand all-rounder, Corey Anderson, the former Australia limited overs captain, Aaron Finch, and his 2021 Men’s T20 World Cup-winning teammate, Marcus Stoinis.

Another Australian, the in-form Mitch Marsh, will play for Seattle, as will the 30-year-old former South Africa