18 minute read
VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE 2.O
Clavius Base is a fictional lunar settlement in the Space Odyssey literary universe created by Arthur C. Clarke. Below as it was depicted on film by Stanley Kubrick in 1968.
A story of cannons, bubbles, garbage and Greek Gods.
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by Eleni Palles
Eleni Boutsika-Palles is an architect and artist, she works interdisciplinary and with different media. From installations and speculative objects to video and text, her works reflect on potential urban futures. She is currently a university assistant at the the department for architectural theory of the University of Innsbruck and is writing her dissertation on fiction as method.
>> www.elenipalles.com
In October 2019 it was announced that by 2024, NASA will land astronauts on the Moon as part of their new lunar exploration program. The mission is named ARTEMIS after the Greek goddess of the moon and twin sister of Apollo and will allegedly begin a new era where robots and humans will work together to push the boundaries of what’s possible in space exploration. In collaboration with private commercial companies, NASA’s ambition is to achieve a long-term sustainable presence on the Moon enabling humans to go on to Mars and beyond.
Since 2009, when NASA detected the presence of water ice, the interest for the Moon was revived. The advances in engineering that have taken place since the last Apollo missions, could nowadays turn the Moon into a station for launching rockets and satellites farther into the solar system. Lunar construction projects now seem feasible and the mining of water and precious materials could theoretically finally allow humans to inhabit what was previously believed to be a dry rock. The ambitious ARTEMIS mission comes with illustrated timelines and fancy corporate identities, entrepreneurial business ideas, gender-fair space travel, new evolved spacesuits and promises of immortality. Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos already last year presented his company’s Blue Moon robotic lunar lander that will bring NASA’s astronauts back to the Moon by 2024.
But how new is all this really? How spectacular? The philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard is most infamous in non-philosophical circles for having said that the Gulf War did not take place. The theory is that these days, the ‘model’ precedes the event and exhausts it totally in advance. The Gulf war was played out as simulation before any tanks began rolling, and then it was played out again as simulation through videogame-style missile-runs on TV. Behind this orgiastic virtuality, the 'real' event was nowhere to be seen. Baudrillard also claimed in 1992 that the year 2000 would not happen. So? Did it?
Maybe this revived enthusiasm for the moon is exactly such a case of an exhausted model as Baudrillard described it. Since fiction has already settled mankind to the moon in simulations, is it even possible to isolate any new information from their perfect models of simulation? This article looks back at some of the most significant moonwalks and revisits the vehicles, the habitats and the moonscapes as they were envisioned by scientists, architects and artists.
Illustration by Alessandro Gottardo for TIME 1959
Illustration by Alessandro Gottardo for TIME 1969
Illustration by Alessandro Gottardo for TIME 2019
In cannons
How we got there
It was Jules Verne who first put the idea of inhabiting the Moon into popular literature. The heroes of his 1865 novel De la terre à la lune use a space gun to shoot a manned projectile to the moon. The book describes the ambitious undertaking down to the smallest detail; scientific explanations, figures and formulas that are however rough, remarkably accurate for the knowledge of the time. The 1872 illustrated edition of the book featured the contemporary visual artists’ imagination of the endeavor and over a century later provided inspiration for Disneyland’s Space Mountain. The retrofuturistic steampunk-detailed appearance depicts Verne’s fictional cannon named Columbiad and the ride takes the visitors on a ride from the Earth to the Moon and back.
Illustration of the Space Mountain in Disneyland.
Inspired by the fiction of Jules Verne, the father of all practical attempts at space travel K. Tsiolkovsky, sent his first man to space in what he called a ‘controllable metallic balloon’. Taking a cue from Verne, Tsiolkovsky created science-fiction stories of his own, hoping to spread the science behind his ‘unbelievable’ ideas. In 1892's On the Moon , the main character is suffering from a fever dream where he imagines that he and a friend are on the Moon. He describes the weightlessness, cold, and darkness of being on the moon, and often describes things in such detail that it reads more like a lecture. Along with his designs and prototypes for rockets and space stations, he elaborated on closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for man’s extraterrestrial habitats. His studies and blueprints inspired further works of fiction that sent man to the moon like the 1936 soviet movie Cosmic Voyage for which Tsiolkovsky worked as a scientific advisor and for which a mock-up of his envisioned rocket was built. He contributed decisively to the accuracy with which the experimental laboratory, the huge hangar, the spaceship, its engines, its interior, the illuminators, the moon’s surface, the spacesuits, the heavy weighted boots, and all other technical details were rendered and predicted by the movie, creating an atmosphere full of utopian enthusiasm and Edisonian inventiveness.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s projected Moon Capitol model.
A model of the Tsiolkovky-inspired spaceship that would take humans to the Moon in the 1936 Soviet movie, Cosmic Voyage. National Air and SpaceMuseum, Smithsonian Institution.
In his 1901 novel H. G .Wells sends The first Men on the Moon using a new material called ‘cavorite’ that can negate the force of gravity. Even in fantasy space ventures have always mingled idealistic and worldly motives: the novel’s narrator wants to make money, his collaborator dreams of knowledge. Together they take their first walk on the Moon. Their spherical space-ship made of steal and coated with cavorite lands on the moon that is presented as a desolate landscape, but as the sun rises the thin frozen atmosphere vaporizes and strange plants begin to grow rapidly. They also encounter insectoid lunar natives called 'Selenites' but their encounter doesn’t end well. The cavorite-coated polyhedron story found its way to the silver screen in 1964 and entered our homes via TV and the 2010.
Still from the coloured version of Georges Méliès Voyage dans la Lune, 1902.
Illustration by E. Hering, 1901.
A year later in 1902 Georges Méliès presented the first ever moonwalk to be captured on film. Voyage dans la Lune was filmed in a set built like a glasshouse and as big as a theatre, Méliès’ explorers ‘injure’ the anthropomorphic Moon while on their arrogant ventures. The Moon here is seen as another unexplored continent appealing to human’s sense of wonder in the face (pun intended) of an unexplored universe.
Fritz Lang set his Frau im Mond in 1929. The movie takes a more pragmatic and less fairy-tale approach to space travel as actual rocket scientists (including Wernher von Braun) were involved in the making as scientific consultants. This explains the film’s portrayal of a multi-staged rocket carrying the protagonists to outer space.
Stills from Fritz Lang's Die Frau im Mond depicting the rocket that made it to the moon inside and outside. The rocket’s design is explainedwith a miniature in the film.
Behind the scenes: The huge moon sets at legendary Babelsberg Studios.
In the decades to follow, fiction and popular culture continued to pave the way to the Moon and contributed significantly to both the imagination and the wish to conquer other planets. In most cases the rhetoric of ‘exploration’ extended the colonial narrative beyond the post-colonial earth and into space. The concept of the Moon as earth’s 8th continent became a common theme or aspiration in science fiction literature and cinema both in the United States and the Soviet Union. Until the end of the 60s everyone who was anyone had been to the Moon. From James Bond to Bugs Bunny and Tintin, the film and comic industry found and endless source of imagination also as direct reflection of the political and social movements of the time. The conquerors faced challenges like dangerous moon inhabitants (e.g. love-starved catwomen) or rivals from other countries on earth.
Tintin in On a marché sur la Lune. Hergé. 1954.
Poster from the 1953 film Cat-women of the Moon, directed by Arthur Hilton.
In the comedy Mouse on the Moon (1963) a small European country sent its astronaut using a Russian space rocket fueled with exploding wine. The satire of the space race and international politics produced surreal pictures merging high-end technology with provincial settings.
In 1968 Stanley Kubrick documented a detailed Moon landing scene in his legendary 2001: Space Odyssey. This scene had a huge impact among an audience who was anticipating to watch the Apollo mission landings on their TV in less than a year.
Stills from Disney's Mand and the Moon showing Wernher von Braun explaining how a space station will be built in outer-space toeventually bring man to the Moon.
Docufictions such as Man and the Moon (USA, 1955) and Luna (USSR 1965) provided humans with a live action simulation from inside and outside the manned shuttles that reached the lunar surface.
Man on the Moon is Part of a famous Disney television series. It begins with a humorous look with man's fascination with the Moon through animation. This segment features characteristics of the Moon depicted from William Shakespeare and children's nursery rhymes to lunar superstitions and scientific research. The second part features scientists (including Wernher von Braun) who give details about their voyage vision including models of the space- crafts and the space stations that will be constructed in outer space as an outpost to the Moon.
Luna also consists of two parts, the first part is a retrospective of man’s achievements in outer space up to its time and the second part shows how the Moon in the near future will be developed by people from a hypothetical first lunar mission to lunar cities and laboratories.
There is an anecdote that shortly before NASA launched Apollo 11, it received a letter from the Union of Persian Storytellers, begging NASA to change the plan: A Moon landing would rob the world of its illusions, and rob the union’s members of their livelihood.
In the decades since Apollo 11, NASA has invented Earth-mapping satellites, launched the Hubble Space Telescope, collaborated on the International Space Station, and studied Mars. But none of these projects have generated the broad and childlike wonder of the Moon.
Stills from Luna showing a scientist conducting experiments on the lunar surface and below a lunar city.
Moonbase Alpha, a scientific research centre on the Moon as depicted in the TV series Space: 1999. Created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson,1975-1977.
In bubbles
How we lived there
After we suited up and rode our astral vehicles to the moon, the most comprehensive Lunar Base Handbook gave us instructions on how to design and build a lunar base, while it examined the physiological and psychological aspects of space travel and extraterrestrial settlements.
Over the years scientists, engineers and artists have provided us with designs that have taken into consideration all intricate technical parameters including site selection and specialized infrastructure. Rigid or inflatable structures, igloos, railroads, ecospheres, domes, space ports, laboratories, observatories, sports arenas, mining and manufacturing plants – man has inhabited them all.
Thinkers conceptualizing moon cities throughout the 50’s and 60’s ranged from author Arthur C. Clarke, who already in 1954 described in full detail the igloo-shaped buildings on the moon powered by a nuclear reactor, to the participants in 1968’s Stanford-Ames Summer Faculty Workshop in Engineering Systems Design, who took mankind to their MOONLAB, a moon base located close to the lunar equator. The MOONLAB program began with the first Apollo moon landing. By 1976 a rotating three-person crew lived in the first habitat for three months at a time. The habitat had three stories, the top floor was used for storage and provided radiation protection for the crew as it was buried under several feet of lunar regolith. Gradually the crew expanded to include 24 people and in 1982 farms were built that housed plants grown in lunar soil and provided 75 percent of the crew’s food needs. In 1984 a 40-inch telescope was brought to the moon and showed humankind the way to further explorations into the galaxies. In 2001 the lunar base was inhabited by 1.100 residents as documented in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey.
The key to the colonization of the new frontier no longer lay in the invention of rockets and armed weapons, but in the management of the human physiology. For humans to transport themselves into outer space, they would have to carry along an artificial environmental earth bubble. This closed system with its internal circulation and recirculation of matter and ideas within a defined radius and circumference became a theme with various cultural reflections in the 60s and 70s.
The concept of the closed resource regeneration systems migrated from the space program to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living and gave us built manifestations of our inhabitation of the universe. The famous Earthrise image taken by Apollo 8 in 1968 contributed decisively to the collective feeling of anxiety in cultural imagination and to a broad literature projecting plans for our future survival within what Buckminster Fuller famously called ‘spaceship earth’.
This immersive imagery might also be held accountable for a genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems, or smaller highly engineered earth microcosms. The vision of an enclosed environment placed in extreme uninhabitable worlds intrigued architects and designers over the years and established a repertoire of research techniques, a set of tools for thinking of the design process and a language as basis for experimental spatial practice.
Man on the Moon, Illustration by Klaus Bürgle, 1958.
Closed recirculatory systems went beyond being just a cultural fascination with the space program and became a key concept for emerging architectural concerns related to the future of habitation. In many ways, the detachment from the main urban supply networks depicted a collective skepticism towards the urban condition, which was portrayed by both the counterculture and the space program as a catastrophic environment that restrains the imagination and the freedom of the individual.
Looking at the habitat as a total organic system, projects like Graham Caine's Eco-House, Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, the Earthship architecture concept and Biosphere II, allowed us to redefine and test our earthly habitats before migrating to the moon.
Graham Caine’s Eco-House was built in South London in 1972 as a laboratory and living experiment. It was was a fully functionalintegrated system that converted human waste to methane for cooking, aswell as maintained a hydroponic greenhouse with radishes, tomatoes, andeven bananas. After having lived in the house for two years with hisfamily, Caine was asked to destroy it in 1975. The Eco-House was anisland uprooted from its urban and detached from the man urban supplynetworks context like its own planet, but very much in exchange withphysiological parameters: temperature, water, light, humidity, and soforth calculated in numeric data. Here Caine's diagram for theEco-House. Courtesy of Grahame Caine. This drawing was reprinted inStefan Szcelkun's Survival Scrapbook, vol. 5: energy (Bristol, uk:unicorn Bookshop Press, 1975.)
Founded by Paolo Soleri in the desert of Arizona and following the principles or arcology (architecture & ecology), Arcosanti served asan urban laboratory to test and demonstrate an alternative humanhabitat. He began construction in 1970 with the goal to explore anddemonstrate how urban conditions could be improved while minimizing thedestructive impact on the earth. Up to this day Arcosanti has permanenthabitats and continues to develop as an experiential learning center andwalk-through demonstration of how to pursue efficient alternatives tourban sprawl.
Michael Reynolds' first building, the Thumb House, was built in the early 1970s. It included features incorporated into later Earthshipdesigns.
The Earthship architecture concept began to take shape in the 1970s. The architect Michael Reynolds’ vision was to create a home that couldprovide, just like a spaceship, everything the inhabitants need tosurvive. Using natural and re-purposed materials and no specializedbuilding techniques Reynolds’ Earthships produced their own water,electricity, and food. Earthship in the Greater World Community in Taos, New Mexico, open for tours and available for sleepovers.
Biosphere 2 was conceived to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space. Itwould explore the web of interactions within life systems in astructure with different areas based on various biological biomes. Inaddition to the several biomes and living quarters for people, there wasan agricultural area and work space to study the interactions betweenhumans, farming, technology and the rest of nature as a new kind oflaboratory for the study of the global ecology. Its mission was atwo-year closure experiment with a crew of eight humans. Long-term itwas seen as a precursor to gain knowledge about the use of closedbiospheres in space colonization. As an experimental ecological facilityit allowed the study and manipulation of a mini biospheric systemwithout harming Earth's biosphere. The experiments ran into problemsincluding low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many animals andplants, group dynamic tensions among the resident crew, outside politicsand a power struggle over management and direction of the project.
Of garbage
How we wasted our future
By 1972 we had done it all. We colonized, we transported our 'civilized world', we appropriated and when the excitement was over we left without picking up our trash. A long list of equipment parts, tools, commemorative, artistic and personal objects lie on the surface of the moon as indisputable evidence that the Moon did become Earth’s 8th continent.
The lunar surface is pitted with craters made by crashed spacecraft. Some, like early Soviet probes, were designed to interact with the Moon surface, while others, like the Apollo lunar modules, were scuttled after their missions were complete. And a fair number of spacecraft collided with the Moon by accident. As the Moon has no atmosphere, and therefore no wind, lunar soil is engraved with the footsteps of every visitor. The landscape itself has become a map of their curiosities. The lunar tourist can visit defunct exploring rovers, flags, diverse memorabilia as well as less romantic leftovers, like bags of human waste.
Preserved by the vacuum of space, this moonscape has been left undisturbed for nearly six decades. FOR ALL MOONKIND, a non-profit organization that seeks to protect Human Heritage in outer space, argues that this merits the same recognition and protection as common heritage on Earth. As the Moon is about to get crowded again, the nostalgia of what the future looked like in the past, finds its voice through space lawyers and policy makers who develop new strategies to protect this legacy.
Right now, there are around 50 different places where human culture has landed, and they’re quite diverse. A huge amount of USSR stuff, a huge amount of US stuff – but also Japanese and Indian and Chinese. The Moon is already culturally diverse and all these different cultures are reflected upon its valuable archaeological record. One can well imagine a physical touristic theme park on site, but it is also likely there will be a form of lunar tourism, which involves us projecting ourselves into robots and going for a little jaunt across the lunar surface. What was in the 70s a holy place for the future it was promising, has now become a holy place for the optimistic past it manifests. The Apollo mission landing sites have thus become an archive of remnants that say more about humankind than any carefully designed monument ever could. If we wish to remember these glorious futures, we ought to account for all that was left behind, both the grand gestures — and the garbage.
From FOR ALL MOONKIND's Vimeo channel https://vimeo.com/350351755
Apollo 17's Lunar Surface Gravimeter https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ALSEP_AS17134-20501.jpg
Of Greek Gods
How we became immortal
The interplanetary world is a lot like the ancient one, humans still need gods and myths to help them deal with death. Only today, the statues and temples have been replacedby heroic expeditions that promise to rescue humanity before it goesdown with ‘spaceship earth’. Apollo and Artemis are not anthropomorphicfigures anymore, but missions offering hope for all of earth’s flora and fauna.
Should Earth be destroyed -be it a wayward asteroid or a nuclear war- safeguarding the species requires extra-terrestrial placement of people and their culture. A lunar doomsday vault can be a secure facility to provide humans with all the intellectual and other resources needed to rebuild humanity. The Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC), an organization devoted to the establishment of an off-Earth 'backup' of human civilization, has already envisioned in detail the lunar facility, that in the event of a catastrophe, will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops and livestock. It contains information of humans, plants and animals as well as all necessary processes for survival. Like seed vaults already established on earth18 the lunar ark includes actual seeds, plants and genetic material to aid the terraforming of regions on the Moon or the re-population of the earth once the circumstances allow it.
Screenshot from TIMES Immersive application where one can simulate the moon landing over their smartphone
On a similar note the company Celestis is here to fulfill humanity’s dream of immortality 'up in the heavens' in a quite literal way. By launching a symbolic amount of cremated remains into near-space, Earth orbit, lunar surface or even beyond (depending on your budget), you or your loved one will venture into space as part of a space mission and ride alongside a commercial or scientific satellite, thus becoming one with the cosmos.
For those that cannot wait that long, TIME has launched an app20 through which one can embark on the Apollo 11 simulation, a most accurate 3-D re-creation of the moon landing. Told in two chapters, 'Landing on the Moon' allows one to witness Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s landing; in Chapter 2, one can explore the 'Surface of the Moon', walk around the lunar module, and watch Neil Armstrong in his space suit as he plants the flag.
Souvenirs from the moon: the Apollo Genesis Rock, collected at the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.
Is it even possible any longer to set clear boundaries between illusion and genuine reflections of our basic realities? Simulation has embedded itself within our social and cultural landscape as a primary means of communication and representation; sophisticated semiotics and advanced tooling render fictions better than any reality. We have dreamt of the Moon, we have packed our earthly microcosms and went camping on the Moon, we have trashed the Moon and went out looking for farther colonies. And once we peered over the edge of tomorrow and discovered disenchantment in the spectacle provided by high-tech accomplishments, we seek to relive the thrill the Moon landing spread.
Adopting Baudrillard’s theory, that the ‘model’ preceded the event and exhausted it totally in advance, the Moon landing never happened and will never happen.
