Cat in the box Feburary 13, 2009
It all began with a misunderstanding, a miscommunication created by an imprecise translation from analog to digital. The degree project board presented a device on which a signaler would apparently draw a circuit diagram, causing corresponding LEDs to light for a view. By the cunning or laziness of the device’s creator, the signaler was unaware if there was a direct relationship to the diagram he was creating and which LEDs lit up for the viewer. Both signaler and viewer are hopelessly confused. Erwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment in 1935. He imagined a steel box, which contained a small amount of a radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a hammer, a container with an amount of cyanide, and a cat. If the Geiger counter detects a particle from the radioactive material, the hammer is dropped on the container of cyanide, killing the cat. Early consensus in the field of quantum mechanics held that the cat exists in two superimposed states, dead and alive. Not until the lid is opened do the two states collapse into only one.
An orbital dĂŠtente was staged on July 17, 1975 as two space capsules, Apollo and Soyuz, docked for the first time. The American craft is a fat assembly of platonic solids: cone stacked on cylinder, gleaming silver in the pure sunlight. The Soviet craft is complicated, joined modules lacking reductive geometries. Given that each was built for a similar mission: taking a man to the moon and back, how is it that they came to look so different?
flight? Primarily by the obsolete capsules we keep in museums and by cheap ephemera and commemoratives sold in nearby gift shops. Manned spaceflight’s cultural legacy is not Velcro or tempurpedic mattresses, but junk kept under glass or left in orbit, eventually becoming meteorites in the upper atmosphere. The legacy of manned spaceflight has not be thoroughly appreciated by architects: we though Archigram got us off the hook.
Schrodinger had a problem with the common interpretation of his thought experiment: what happened to the opposing state when the lid was open. His assertion is simple. At the moment the lid is opened, reality splits into two. In one reality, the cat is alive and in the other, it is dead. The Apollo and Soyuz craft are an entangled pair of dead cat and alive cat in reverse. Given different cultural and engineering histories, policies, and even aesthetics each craft developed simultaneously, re-entangling in orbit in 1975.
It is worth another look now that our profession again looks to take up the cause of saving humanity from itself. How to we remember technocratic wonders of a past age? In their obsolescence, what are their capacity as symbols, as ephemeral collectors of dreams?
As a culture, how do we remember these great achievements of space
I dream of drawing machines Feburary 7, 2009
The drawings above were produced by a drawing machine (a great RISD architecture genre) in construction for the past few days. The drawing machine consists of four parts: 1.) The launch pad is a level surface five inches above the floor. A 4 - 1/8 inch square is cut in the center, into which is seated the… 2.) The transport assembly consisting of a rubber stopper with a styrene tube piercing vertically through the center. The tube is attached to a length of vinyl tubing which leads to… 3.) A bicycle pump provides the pneumatic pressure required to launch the… 4.) Rocket which is loaded with an amount of charcoal powder. The charcoal particulate spew from the launch of the pneumatic rocket is registered on the paper. Throughout the historical the historical progression of spacecraft and the
related ground-support infrastructure, it is striking that the developmental decisions are made cumulatively with economy as a primary concern. The space capsules in are museums are rarely results of heroic individual design efforts, but a kind of agglomeration—a metamorphosis like the formation of marble—of countless engineered decisions, revisions, improvements, and leave-well-enough-alone, though it takes an act of policy to begin the processes (see spheres vs. cones or JFK). I’ve made drawing machines (or some kind of overly complicated machine) at least once a year since I’ve been at RISD. This time, I’ve documented the development of the device in a single isometric drawing from conception to current configuration. Once this drawing is finished, it will describe a developmental history full of hypotheses that become facts, false starts, idealism that metamorphs into pragmatic conclusion, and so on. In short, the drawing is an archeological chart of the layered progression of the construct.
The drawings the machine produced at face value border on mere form-finding (which is dangerous), and have less value right now than the process of making the drawing machine (which is not to say that the drawings will not prove useful in the future). The construction of the machine is so valuable, it is like a miniature history of the development of the space program, as manifested in the active and ghost buildings on Merritt Island and the spacecraft launched there. The legacy of decisions, mistakes, and discoveries are pulled forward through time, institutionalized, corrected, and regularized by the small triumph of economy. There is little doubt that my project should focus on a launch complex in the spring. This exploration therefore is the beginning of a diagram or thumbnail sketch. All the components for a launch system are here in micro: static platform, the rocket transporter, fuel production, recovery.
The panelist Feburary 3, 2009
Two take-aways from my valuable conversation with Olga Mesa today: 1) The latest writings that are trying to link the spacecraft discourse to architecture’s current obsession with sustainability may be premature (or at least under-developed). She encouraged me not to take the time I need to develop my topic; only this way will the conceptual work be able to flourish. 2) The graphic work thus far can be read as more than just in the style of commemoratives. Instead, the style imparts constraints that can be valuable to process. For instance, if a thumbnail sketch (that is, a three-dimensional parti that clearly captures the essence of a project) is drawn as a commemorative coin, the rules applied to the coin (two sided, narrative, etc.) can enhance the conceit of the thumbnail sketch. This confluence–commemorative (coin, plate, stamp, etc) and thumbnail sketch—really gives me a strong working conceit as I move forward.
So, in the great RISD tradition, I continue to build my launch pad drawing machine. Hopefully, my first test launch will take place on Thursday, and start producing drawings on Friday.
Now you’re just making up words Feburary 3, 2009
Examining the emerging sustainability movement in architecture* through the lens of the so-called “space race.” ** How do spacecraft achieve their form? Mostly, they are little more than aggregations of related engineering choices and heirarchies. Sometimes, the decision of one becomes policy (political) and guides all subsequent choices. Just as important, what is the life of the spacecraft once its mission is complete? In its obsolescence, its purpose expanded into symbology, dreams, and ephemerality. Can we anticipate this transformation so that our new infrastructure can live out its golden years with grace? The discourse about NASA and spacecraft is not esoteric. As an analogy for architecture, it is worthwhile. Thirty years on, we can see how the space race panned out, we can visit its artifacts in museums. Will architecture reach détente with its environment? Its now state-of-the-art assemblages visited by our grandchildren, obsolete relics of a brave past.
**As characterized by the competing tactics of collectivized piecemeal technological innovations or “green design,” or dangerous meta-narratives, of the sort that culminated in the Pruitt-Igoes of the past. *SPACE RACE: a geo-political struggle disguised as a program of scientific exploration which began in 1959 with the Soviet launch of Sputnik and climaxed with an American astronaut walking on the moon. Arguably, the race ended in 1975 as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecrafts rendezvous in orbit, forming a physical détente of the two nations.
Looking back January 7, 2009
“Architecture is in the mist of an attempt to rebrand itself as holding the fate of the world in its hands. The guilt of the orgasm of construction at the beck and call of speculation and development swings backward as we search for our underwear in the dark. Answering climate change gives us a unique opportunity afforded in the past only as the result of total war: as a profession and an academia, we worship our significance as those who might channel the techno-scientific and the socio-economical, remaking the world that we would have believed we wrought. Panayiota Pyla reminds us in her article “Counter-Histories of Sustainability” that we must not forget the failings of Modernism: “a great cause is not enough!” To face the issue of the role of sustainability in the current architectural landscape, I am channeling the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), particularly during the eight years leading to the moon landing, and during the 20 or so years of Space Shuttle stagnation. The pragmatic goal of sending a human into space and bringing him safely back
to earth becomes a complex collection of forgotten technologies, policies, histories, and individual exertions that congeal into a space capsule, that upon completion of its mission, begins anew its more ineffable life as the enduring symbol of the mission’s achievement. (Is it too cynical to read the Apollo missions as the most expensive PR campaign ever waged? First: Soviets go to space to fight war. Second: Americans go to space to beat soviets. Peacefully. Ultimately, $135 billion in 2005 dollars would be spent to take an American to the moon.) The capsule is analogous in many ways to a building. It is the rational output of research, development, and capital. Unlike architecture, the space capsule itself has no intended poetic or artistic qualities. Its grace or ephemerality is the result of the purity of its movement through Euclidean space, impossibility of its mission, and the adventure and romance of manned space exploration.
Spacecraft usually become obsolete faster than iPods, so we place them in museums, and reproduce their likeness on commemorative issue stamps, coins, t-shirts, hats, books, coffee mugs, et al, etc. In light of the symbolic an obsolete spacecraft assumes, and given that architecture and spacecraft have certain analogous qualities, what will the architecture that saves the planet today be like once the planet is saved and the architecture (infrastructure, maybe?) is obsolete?
August 8, 2008
August 8, 2008
Visual Glossary 3: Ed White returns to the womb January 1, 2009
The first in perhaps a series of coins commemorating the unsung technological heroes of the space program: Umbilicals are great little devices. They connect discrete bodies that must be for some reason isolated. Ed’s umbilical connects him to his mother, giving him life. At birth, his father cruelly cut him from his mother, later in life Mission Control played that role. It is easy to say that Ed and his mother/capsule are two individuals, but their fates are intertwined. The mother gives life to Ed and deals with his waste through the tenuous connection of the umbilical. The tenousness comes from the necessary thinness and complexity of the connection, its failure can easily doom one or the other body. The umbilical is not always as so obvious: we may read the whole as a single body, when it is comprised of two or more discrete bodies joined by an umbilical. The Apollo Command Module and Service Module are as large as possible, pushing against the constraints imposed by material, rocket design, aerodynamics, etc. A
heat sheild, which 1. can not be punchured and 2. must be sheilded from space, divides the CM from the SM. An aerodynamic sacrifice is made for an umbilical that passes fuel, oxygen, data, electricity and so on between the two segments of the Apollo craft. Of course, the space capsule’s father, Mission Control, does not dress in scrubs and cut the cord when the time comes. Instead, a remote-controlled miniature guillotine does the dirty work, cleaving the fuel lines and electrical connections.
Artifacts January 3, 2009
“Adopting this warning to the terms of the architectural debate could mean that sustainability should not become a totalizing concept that subsumes crucial design questions about the social, the cultural, the political, the aesthetic and the physical, which, incidentally, are not unambiguous categories. “Maybe it is good that sustainability does not have a fixed or coherent definition. Maybe it should never have one! Because if the technical questions of energy efficiency or the technocratic questions of efficient resource use or even the questions of socioeconomic management end up constituting THE definition of sustainability in architecture, this will threaten to reduce design to a series of small decisions (on materials, energy or feasibility) that will ultimately have less to do with design and more with management or with political correctness.” -An exciting recap of the recent history of architecture’s growing obsession with sustainability appeared in Volume #18. “Counter-Histories of Sustainability” by Panayiota Pyla
What a great quote! It might get to the heart of my interest in the space program and its relation to the current state of architecture. A series of small decisions (and a few large ones, previously) made by engineers pursuing a simple goal congeal and agglomerate into a space capsule. With the goal accomplished, it settles into to a long retirement as a symbol of past and future accomplishments. On its own, the capsule is hardly significant beyond the billions of dollars and manhours invested in its development and construction, but as a realization of an ambitious, imagination-capturing goal, it is enormous. The shear improbability of the goal (going to moon, building the International Space Station) becomes embodied by the capsule that does the deed. BUT, Pyla does not let us forget, ”we must also remember a lesson from the history of architecture: a great cause is not enough!” Technocratism, co-oped vernaculars, and metanarratives are dangerous pitfalls for architecture to avoid. Is it too much to throw out bloated numbers such as
76% of carbon emissions from electricity generated in American coal-fired power plants will power buildings (via the 2030 Challenge). Should we say 76% of the electricity powers human activities within buildings? Architecture is complicit with the forceful flow of humanity: capital, energy, political power, etc. We can hope to shift this flow, but it cannot reach a critical mass toward common purpose by architecture alone. So then, we have the capsule, a miniature earth floating in space, carrying not only astronauts, but dreams and ambitions.
Visual Glossary 2 January 1, 2009
Competition breeds pragmatism. Ideas (reusable orbiter) fester in the minds of engineers, are slowly developed, waiting for the right time to spring forward. The reusable orbiter is too far beyond the grasp of American engineers in the late 1950’s, who choose a bare-bones capsule design in an effort to keep up with the Soviets. Actual space capsules might not be as exciting as those in science fiction, but they are rigorous nexuses of Newtonian physics, human factors, and history. Some would argue that manned space exploration is an expensive distraction from the more efficient work that robots and probes could be doing; that manned spaceflight is the result of a showboating exercise between two former superpowers. Without the glitz and glam of sweeping visions of space exploration (Kennedy’s push to the moon, Reagan’s Star Wars) the public grows bored. With reusable space shuttle that makes spaceflight seem routine and an expensive and sophisticated work of engineering parked in high earth orbit (the International Space Station), spaceflight has
lost its thrill. So, we remember our past achievements (and expenditures) with commemoratives: postage stamps, coins, plates. Spacecraft are sophisticated marvels of engineering, representing millions of man-hours, billions of dollars, not to mention the lives of the astronauts who took them to space. Once they land, and retrieved from the ocean, encased in Lexan, and hung from a museum’s rafters they are visited, photographed, and dreamed about by an amazed public, most of whom unknowingly committed a few pennies from their weekly paycheck to it. Technical object to collected object. Flying through space to flying through a 10-year-old’s dream. In addition to mediating the myriad factors of spaceflight, the spacecraft has to mediate our hopes, dreams, and ambitions. Somehow the excitement of architecture is not the same of the excitement of tanks, space exploration, and warships. Is it that architecture is too tied to capital and power, or that it is perceived to be mundane, ordinary?
That it does not move? That it does not kill people? Architecture is a slow force. Bullets from an attack helicopter are instaneous.
Visual Glossary 1 December 28, 2008
This is the first installment of a visual glossary of interests related to the research phase of this project. I expect to flesh out these thoughts in the future. For now, each will be represented by a snappy drawing and some text. Some of this may be repetition or reiteration. Modularity vs. Parametrization or ballistic vs. blunt-body re-entry or Soviet vs. American: I keep coming back to the American/Soviet space race-era capsule design. This work produced two separate morphological threads of space craft development, even though each family of vehicles represents a response to the same environmental and mission constraints. Beginning in earnest at least in the 1950’s (if not earlier) American and Soviet scientists and engineers began to tackle the same basic problem: put a man into orbit and bring him safely back to earth. These groups were not only separated by language, culture, and geography, but also an intense veil of secrecy. To me, it is a perfect test case for how diagrams are developed
into formal responses to a design problem. As presented here, the most obvious difference in morphology between the American Apollo Command Module and the Soviet Soyuz is that former is a cone and the latter is a series of spheres. It can be argued that this difference of opinion can be traced back to a single decision early in the history of each program concerning which re-entry. The problem of re-entry troubled designers because it was unknown if a capsule could withstand the intense heat generated by the friction of atmospheric drag as it fell from orbit. Perhaps pragmatically, the Soviets chose to shape their capsule as a simple ballistic sphere, fully enclosed in a heat shield. The capsule’s center of mass was placed behind the cosmonaut so that the sphere would orient itself properly over the course of the reentry. The ratio of solid to void within the spherical Vostok is acceptable for one or two cosmonauts, but a trip to the moon would require three or four.
Increasing the radius of a sphere dramatically increases the volume; so dramatically that the volume risks becoming TOO great. So, the Soviets leave the radius basically unchanged from the 1-man Vostok to the 3-man Soyuz, and choose instead to stack the spheres, and thus more precisely increasing the interior volume of the vehicle. The Americans, on the other hand, settled upon the blunt-body as the best shape for a re-entering spacecraft. By flattening the leading face of the capsule, a shockwave would form, slowing the craft and decreasing the size of the heavy, expensive, and fragileheatshield. The Mercury spacecraft then, is a truncated cone. While the Soviets have only one dimension to determine their craft’s size (radius), the Americans have two (radius and height). If the width of the rocket sets the radius of the cone, the height can be used to increase or decrease the internal volume of the capsule until its JUST right. The cone has a secondary benefit: one side responds to the need for a tapered, more
“Th
Januar y 18, 1969 e
m
er
ot
h
la
nd
he
ars
kn / The motherland
ow
s.
..
�
aerodynamic shape at lift-off, while the other is flattened for re-entry, eliminating an aerodynamic launch shroud employed by Soyuz.
Maybe Soviet scientists never saw a Buck Rogers comic book during the development of Vostok. These questions are more elusive.
In spite of its apparent weaknesses, Soyuz today is the world’s most prolific launch system. In this case, parametrization is expensive and ill-suited to flexible or changing mission profiles, while a collection of smaller specialized modules are cheap and versatile. This division between American and Soviet, parametrization and modularity is easy to trace to a rational decision made by scientists, but what other INTANGIBLE factors contribute to the primordial decision?
As we look to the diagram as driver in architecture, we must acknowledge how personalities, cultures,idiosyncrasies, and the accumulated weight of primal decisions subvert the rationality of the diagram into a form that fits life. Modern architecture is theconcretization of a diagram, forcing life to bend to its will. The fundamental truth of the diagram should not be denied, but to make an architecture the diagram must bend to intangibles‌
Where Americans hopeless romantics, feeling it necessary to bring as much of the mighty ship home as possible, while the Soviets are a crass and godless people who have no qualms about leaving two-thirds of their space hardware to burn in the atmosphere? And what of the supremacy of the United States Navy and the vastness of the Russian tundra, what role did these factors play into capsule development?
“Pl
December 26, 1968 e e as
ea
,
d
r
G
od
, d p.” on’t u k c le me fu
Possibilities December 22, 2008
Enrique Martinez: “Is yuxtaposition [sic] a one-step action? Is it self-sustaining?” Andrew Liebchen: “This juxtaposition does have the air of a one-step action, but in this case, I think that the perposterousness of the translocation provides a one-time kick in the pants.”
Cantilevers in our midst December 20, 2008
Look at the engineered forms of space capsules, aircraft carriers, bridges as you look at Dutch architecture: rational physicalizations of a diagram. As the products of humanity, engineered form carries with it the cultural history of the engineers who created it. These differences can be reconciled by examined pairs of engineered objects, entangled by similar diagrams but divergent in their form. Additionally, how do these precise objects hold necessary program beyond their diagrams, or program that is un-diagrammable? The restaurant of the May 25th sporting center in Belgrade, Serbia was featured on Dezeen, a trendy design blog the other day. Evidently, the cantilevered structure was intended both as a landmark and a exclusive dining facility to the communist elite, and is known as the Danube Flower. Tito himself dined there on November 22, 1973, its opening night. Rechristened “Wellness Sky,” the triangular building is now a health club and spa, presumably catering to the wealthy elite of Belgrade. There is scant information on the Danube Flower available to
searches of Google and Wikipedia. It seems that Dezeen is now the repository of all knowledge on the internet related to this curious relic from a communist past.
P&O is a bland office block in a dour city. In death, the true nature of the building’s structure was revealed. It was a communist floating restaurant in a capitalist’s generic office clothing.
Rooms floating in the air are convenient building forms for the elite: access to them is limited to a single, wellprotected point, not unlike a medieval castle. Unlike a castle, the elite should be confident that their cantilevered structure will not be siege by anyone with a catapult. In the democratic west, our shopping malls seem to be the opposite of the floating restaurant of the communist elite. I can draw a diagram to describe each that would look remarkably similar: in the communist example the divisive field is air and in the democratic example the divisive field is parked cars.
(Kundera: “They wanted to efface hundreds of thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his whole body on that idyll, like a stain. He’ll stay there just as Clementis’s hat stayed on Gottwald’s head.”)
The P&O building in London was demolished from the ground up. Backwards demolition is counter intuitive, but in this particular office building the floor plates were suspended from roof truss girders which were in turn supported by the central core. In life,
In this diagram, let’s not forget that A1 and A2 were Apollo astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, and Vance D. Brand, while C1 and C2 were Anatoli Filipchenko and Nikolai Rukavishnikov. All were military pilots before they became spacemen, and they performed the first orbital docking between two nations that were once on the brink of Thermonuclear war. The first extra-planetary handshake between two terrestrial countries took place in a tube.
Surveying the field December 19, 2008
According to reports, 10,000 crosscountry skiers took part in the 2008 Engadin Ski Marathon, a 42.2 km race from Maloja, Switzerland to the mountain resort of St. Moritz. I like that the skiers, as a field, mark the topography of the snow by virtue of their stance. Each skier acts has a limited set of techniques at his or her disposal, honed over the history of the sport and derived from the constraints of the human body and the sport’s equipment. These techniques: herringbone, classic-stride (whatever, I don’t ski) are in response to the conditions underneath the skier’s skis. Uphill, downhill, accelerate, decelerate. Gather together 10,000 skiers who all operate within the same simple rules, spread them equally over a terrain and they make a kind of topographic model of that terrain. Each skier measures the conditions immediately around him, taken at a whole, and a larger picture emerges. Look at the obtuse skis as the skiers climb the hill, generously spaced to allow for the sweeping stride of the climb, while into the valley, the skiers cluster together as their straight
skis coast down the hill. I remember reading that a 19th c. biologist said that the Nematode (roundworm) is such a prolific organism that if all material on earth were to be disappear, leaving the Nematodes in their place, the lattice of their bodies would outline of the mountains, continents, rivers, etc. A little tangential, but this whole post is tangential.
Bizarro
December 18, 2008 In 1975, the engineered forms of the US Apollo module and the USSR Soyuz joined in a symbolic end of the space race and intergalactic détente. Imagine the cultural, political, scientific, and historical forces wrapped up in the moment when the hatch opens, and three American astronauts join their two cosmonaut colleagues. It is a moment of historical significance, taking place in a physical space that has been engineered for a specific purpose—safe and economical spaceflight—and not diplomatic relations. In the tight tube of an airlock, representatives of two enemy people unite in a handshake, as their spacecraft have united in orbit. This occurrence is more frequent than not, the reuse of space beyond the intent of its design.
Spheres v. Cones December 17, 2008
You have to give the Soviets their pragmatism. The craft they designed and developed for circum-lunar travel, the Soyuz, is now the longest serving spacecraft in the history of manned space flight. While NASA had abandoned the platonic Apollo for the quasi-recyclable, not really feasible Space Shuttle, the Russians were patiently launching good-old Soyuz over and over again. How did the bug-looking form of the Soyuz come into being, especially compared to its counterpart, Apollo? I’m sure the answer is complex, but I would like to point out one difference in opinion between the American and Soviet spacecraft designers which influenced the shape of all subsequent craft. It has to do with re-entry: “The Soviets, under the leadership of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, chief designer of spacecraft, reviewed the different possibilities and chose the sphere for their reentry configuration. According to Korolev, among non-lifting shapes the spherical reentry body alone pos
sessed an inherent dynamic stability as it plunged back into the earth’s atmosphere…” While the Americans: “Allen’s work indicated that a blunt shape would be most suitable for a body reentering the earth’s atmosphere, since 90 percent of the friction heat would be dissipated through the bow shock wave. Tests five years later, in 1957, with a scale model JupiterC nosecone demonstrated that the remaining heat could be dissipated through use of an ablative coating on a heat shield.” (both quotes from the online version of The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program) Soviets add modules, Americans parameterize. The difference of opinion about how to shape a re-entry vehicle defines the divide between US and Soviet craft to this day. So, while the Soviets are pushing for a simple sphere completely covered by a heat shield, the United States is chasing a conical “blunt-body” design which would use a
shockwave as its primary heat dissipater. ** As the mission profile expands to include two and three cosmonauts, a single sphere becomes too large to place on the nose of a rocket. What to do? Divide interior space of the craft into two spheres: one with a heat shield for re-entry, and one which is only for orbit and will be left as spacejunk. Apollo, on the other hand, descends from blunt-body design. The conical shape of the re-entry vehicle conveniently is the perfect shape to reduce the aerodynamic drag of lift-off. While the sphere has only one parameter to increase its volume (its radius), the cone has two (its height and radius). If the necessary interior volume required for a lunar flight has not been achieved at maximum radius, one only needs to increase the height of the cone to further boost volume. The legacy of a design can be traced back to a single decision, which through repetition becomes ideology. Can we say that the modules of the International Space Station are more
Russian than American, or does the space station represent a hybridization (modules sized on the dimensions and lifting capability of the American Space Shuttle, the ultimate in NASA parametrization)? Guns in space. If an American capsule blows off course during re-entry, an astronaut may have to spend a threehour-tour on a tropical ocean cruise polishing off the remnants of his space-ice cream stash, while a cosmonaut faces hungry wolves on the frozen Russian steppes. For this reason, all Soyuz capsules have been armed with a collapsible gun, first developed in 1982 but not deployed until 1986.*** The gun has three barrels, one for flares, one for shotgun shells, and the other for bullets. Reportedly, the gun is very accurate and easy to use. The gun is interesting not because it is sinister, but because it is a strange and logical resultant of a mix of geography, design, and culture tied up in an object (the spacecraft) that somehow viewed as somehow pure. The craft operates in a world of pure economics, physics, and engineering—launch, life-sup
port, re-entry. But then there is this moment, a human moment, when all the beauty of the craft’s Newtonian simplicity is thwarted by error or the unforeseeable. And so, we carry a gun into space to shoot wolves when we land. *The quote goes on to say, “…He rejected the conical craft, because its tendency to pitch and yaw would have required an elaborate attitude control system, plus greater reliance upon man as pilot rather than man as passenger.” **In early Soviet Vostok craft, the pilot would eject from the capsule following re-entry and parachute to the ground. On the other hand, Mercury astronauts stayed in their capsules from launch to splash-down. Is there something more in this image of a cosmonaut bursting from his fiery womb and parachuting to the ground that pushes the man as a hero apart from his machine? I can’t think of the name Alan Shepard without thinking of the name of his Mercury capsule, Frienship 7. Who remembers Gagarin’s Vostok 3KA-2?
***These guns are not the first in space. Salyut 3, a Russian military space station launched in 1974, carried an aircraft “self-defense” gun mounted to its exterior, to repeal any American incursion. Reportedly, the gun successfully destroyed a satellite.
Post-script Feburary 16-, 2009
Enrique sent me an email with some thoughts about our first pin-up on Sunday. He mentioned that I probably didn’t want my project to be lost in nostalgia for the space race; that Clarke and Kubrick were reacting to present conditions for them. But, he does think that distance of history could be an asset, depending upon how I continue to frame my problem. Below is my response: From: Andrew Liebchen To: Enrique Martinez Subject: RE: Notes from Yesterday EnriqueThanks for the feedback. The thing that interests me about the 60’s and 70’s is that it was a time when mainstream America was genuinely interested in space exploration in a way that it hasn’t been since (except when something goes disasterously wrong). Today, the only people who get
excited about space are children. The Apollo-Soyuz moment is particularly compelling because it is awkwardly bracketed between two eras: the excitement of going to the moon, and the endless monotony of the space shuttle. Today, really interesting things are happening in the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry. For example, the commercial cargo (and perhaps manned) flights to the International Space Station will fill in the gap between the end of the Space Shuttle program and the beginning of NASA’s new Constellation program. While this is troubling for all the usual reasons brought up when the privatization of government function is discussed, it is thrilling for other reasons. No longer will access to space be limited to highly trained astronauts on government salaries and the super-rich, but as cost de-
creases and factors of safety increase, going to space will seem closer to us all. So, should terrestrial launch facilities hold a government cost-engineered affordabledrop-ceiling aesthetic? Or do we take a page from mid-century airport architecture and build infrastructural human space that celebrates and enriches the act and experience of going into orbit? Obviously, I am all about the latter. Did you take pictures when you visited the platforms? I’d like to check them out. Also, I have class on Wednesday morning (until noon). Thanks! -Andrew.