Archive for March, 2010

The Raygun Gothic Rocketship featured on the NASA Ames website

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Click HERE for the full story

photo by Sean Donnelly

A 40-foot high rocket from the future and a 20-foot tall bird with its head and wings on fire will light up on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. Is this a science experiment gone awry? No, it’s all part of Yuri’s Night.

Yuri’s Night is a world space party that commemorates the anniversary of the first human spaceflight, by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 and the first space shuttle mission 20 years later. An estimated 10,000 people are expected to attend the Bay Area celebration from noon to midnight.

During this “mash-up” of music, dance, technology, art and space, two large-scale art installations that previously have been exhibited at the Burning Man Festival will be displayed: the “Raygun Gothic Rocketship” and “Angel of the Apocalypse.”

What these two giant sculptures share in common is that they both were built by dozens of team members collectively working together.

Sean Orlando, one of three lead artists for “Raygun Gothic Rocketship,” said the effort required the work of 85 artists, engineers, fabricators, scientists and computer engineers. “One of the remarkable things about this group of people is how few issues there are,” said Orlando. “When it comes to actual work and the design process, it truly is very collaborative.”

The retro-futuristic rocket stands four stories high, weighs 3,500 pounds and requires a crane with a 40-foot, 5-ton installation capability. The structure is divided into three sections: a life sciences bio lab, engineering room, crew quarters and a command module. Interior details include “alien specimens” in the life sciences bio lab, a zero gravity bed and a deployable rocket launcher.

“We’re sci-fi geeks who like to play with machines and tools,” said lead artist David Shulman. “Our inspiration was from the 1930s through early 1950s when technology was within sight, but the reality of what it would entail or the Cold War pessimism had not set in yet.”

The term, “Raygun Gothic” is an artistic style coined by science fiction author William Gibson. Orlando said the name refers to how people in the past imagined the future.

“We’re thrilled to be able to bring it to a NASA facility and share it with people who are interested in space exploration—both the serious side and the fun side,” said Orlando.

Click HERE for the full story

The Rocketship scheduled to land @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2010

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

The Rocketship and Tom Sepe’s RGR Moon Rover have been cleared for landing at Yuri’s Night, NASA Ames in Mountain View, California on planet Earth. April 9-10, 2010 C.E.

Limited Edition Raygun Gothic Rocketship Papercraft Models For Sale

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Limited edition papercraft models of The Raygun Gothic Rocketship are for sale on Makers Market.

We’re not going to say exactly how we got these…

But we will say there are several Tublians on Neblous-9 who risked allot to get these to us. I hope none of them lost any gills getting them to us.

Here are Top Secret Rocket Corps documents (Dogstar clearance and higher!) that have full specifications and Materliser specs for The Raygun Gothic Rocketship.

Normally these could produce a perfect, working, Raygun Gothic Rocketship by printing on Piperiarian Dimensional Flux Sheet, assembling it with nanobots and placing it in a 7-axis Materliser.

However, because such technology is banned on Earth (don’t complain to us, send a beammail to your Universe Senator), we’ve printed them on on 100lb glossy paper.

You can use a sharp knife and some adhesive to make yourself a scale, paper model of The Raygun Gothic Rocketship.

For $12.50 you get a full papercraft model printed on 100lb. glossy paper that we mail to you.

Join the Rocket Corps today!

Created by Almost Scientific

RGR & Almost Scientific featured on Boing Boing

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Click here for the full posting

Laser cut model rocketship

David Pescovitz at 10:38 AM March 5, 2010

 System Product Images 952 Original Raygun Gothic Rocket Wooden Almost Scientific 1 Of 5

photo above by minor9th

The Raygun Gothic Rocketship is a 40 foot retro-future rocket ship model created by Sean Orlando, Nathaniel Taylor, David Shulman. For those unable to climb aboard in person, Almost Scientific has created a stately and elegant scale model. It’s laser cut from 1/8″ ply wood, 13″ tall, and ships flat in a envelope! Yours for $100 in the Boing Boing Bazaar at the Makers Market.

Raygun Gothic Rocketship Wooden Model

Wooden prototype model of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Created by Almost Scientific

New York Times: Space & Cosmos

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Reaching for the Stars When Space Was a Thrill

From “Another Science Fiction”/Blast Books

Using aviation industry ads, a new book revisits a time when outer space still thrilled, and cold war paranoia reigned.

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: March 8, 2010

It was “Mad Men” meets “Flash Gordon.”

The years from 1957 to 1962 were a golden age of science fiction, as well as paranoia and exhilaration on a cosmic scale. The future was still the future back then, some of us could dream of farms on the moon and heroically finned rockets blasting off from alien landscapes. Others worried about Russian moon bases.

Scientists debated whether robots or humans should explore space. Satellites and transistors were jazzy emblems of postwar technology, and we were about to unravel the secrets of the universe and tame the atom (if it did not kill us first).

Some of the most extravagant of these visions of the future came not from cheap paperbacks, but from corporations buffing their high-tech credentials and recruiting engineering talent in the heady days when zooming budgets for defense and NASA had created a gold rush in outer space.

In the pages of magazines like Aviation Week, Missiles and Rockets and even Fortune, companies, some famous and some now obscure, were engaged in a sort of leapfrog of dreams. And so, for example, Republic Aviation of Farmingdale, N.Y. — “Designers and Builders of the Incomparable Thundercraft” — could be found bragging in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine in 1959 about the lunar gardening experiments it was doing for a future Air Force base on the moon.

Or the American Bosch Arma Corporation showing off, in Fortune, its “Cosmic Butterfly,” a solar-powered electrically propelled vehicle to ferry passengers and cargo across the solar system.

Most Americans never saw these concoctions, but now they have been collected and dissected by Megan Prelinger, an independent historian and space buff, in a new book, “Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962.” It is being published on May 25 by Blast Books.

Ms. Prelinger and her husband, Rick, operate the Prelinger Library, a private research library in San Francisco with a heavy emphasis on media, technology and landscape history.

In an e-mail message, Ms. Prelinger said she had grown up “on a cultural diet of science fiction and space,” memories of the moon landings and “Star Trek” merging in her mind. “As a result,” she said, “I grew up believing that I was a junior member of an advanced technological society.”

The book, she said, was inspired by a shipment of old publications to the library, including Aviation Week & Space Technology and Missiles and Rockets. “I little expected that the advertising in their pages would seize my attention more than the articles themselves,” she writes in the introduction to her book.

The ads are chock-full of modernist energy and rich in iconography in ways Ms. Prelinger is happy to elaborate on.

The late ’50s were also the years of the Organization Man. The cover illustration, from an insurance ad, shows a man in a gray flannel suit who is a dead ringer for the existentially confused Don Draper of “Mad Men,” floating alarmed and bewildered among the planets and stars. Time and again, the mountains and valleys of the moon, for example, are portrayed as if they were the mountains, canyons and deserts of the American West, making the space program just another chapter in the ongoing narrative of Manifest Destiny.

In one illustration, the hands of God and Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling have been transformed into a giant pair of space gloves reaching for each other. In another, the silhouette of a spaceship forms a cross.

“These images suggest that the furthest reach of what humankind hoped to find in space was in fact the very essence of infinity,” Ms. Prelinger writes.

Leafing through this book is a walk down my own memory lane. I grew up in Seattle, which was a one-company town dominated by Boeing. Almost everybody worked there sooner or later. My best friend’s father helped design the Saturn V rocket that lifted humans to the moon. After limping out of M.I.T. with a physics degree in the late ’60s, I, too, worked there for a year, playing a kind of space war — shooting high-speed aluminum balls at sheets of aluminum arrayed to simulate the structures of aircraft or spacecraft, to see what the damage would be under various conditions. At the end of the day, my desk was buried in piles of sharp dented and charred sheets of aluminum. I had to count all the holes.

It’s hard to know what to be more nostalgic about, all those childhood dreams of space opera or the optimism of an era in which imagination and technology were booming and every other ad ended with a pitch to come work for the thriving company of the future. “To advance yourself professionally, you should become a member of one these teams. Write to N. M. Pagan,” reads a typical notice from the Martin Company, now part of Lockheed Martin.

You don’t hear that much these days.

Back then, you, too, sitting at a drafting table or in a cubicle, designing antennas or self-locking nuts among acres of such boards and cubicles — “Reaching for the Moon, Mr. Designer?” reads a Kaylock ad — could be a space hero.

And of course it was almost exclusively men depicted in the ads. One exception was an ad from the National Cash Register Company for a new electronic machine for posting checks. “And what the POST-TRONIC does electronically the operator cannot do wrong — because she doesn’t do it at all!” says the ad showing a woman floating in space at the machine’s console.

Naturally, there was a hook to those recruitment ads, as Ms. Prelinger points out. The real business of most of those aerospace companies was not the space program but defense — building fighters, bombers, missiles and other implements of the cold war, not to mention commercial airliners. For many of these places, the space program was more of a hindrance than a boost to the bottom line, a sort of prestigious loss leader to attract cutting-edge talent.

Occasionally, as Ms. Prelinger reports, the darker side of this work bled through into the trade press and the ads, like when the Marquardt Corporation, which made small control rockets for satellites, showed a spy satellite aiming its lens down at Earth.

If the space fever began in 1957 with Sputnik, it cooled by 1962, when the basic plan for the Apollo moon missions was set and there was no more space for imaginations to run wild. Also, by then NASA’s budget was leveling off. Ms. Prelinger said that during this period about half a million engineers, scientists, draftsmen and other people followed the clarion call to blend their talents into the new age, swelling the ranks of aerospace workers to more than a million.

Some of them might have wound up like me. When the “impact mechanics” group was downsized, I was sent to the “weights and measures” group. Our job was to scrutinize rocket blueprints to determine the position and weight of every nut, bolt, washer and any other item on a small upper-stage booster that was to deliver an unknown payload to orbit. The information could be entered into a computer program that would calculate the center of gravity and other dynamical properties of the rocket package.

It was essential but brain-numbing work, and I learned a lot about shooting rubber bands from the wars that broke out every day after lunch.

But it was men and women like these, working in cubicles, who saved the astronauts of Apollo 13 in 1969, by figuring out how to bring them back from the moon alive in a crippled spacecraft.

In the wake of the moon landings and then the end of the cold war, many of those jobs, exciting or not, disappeared, as did many of the companies that advertised them. What has not disappeared in all these years and decades is the yearning and arguing about space.

We’re still fighting about what NASA should do as far as human exploration of the universe is concerned, collectively looking more and more like that bewildered advertising man floating in space on the cover of Ms. Prelinger’s fascinating book. The argument has been going on for my whole life. Since those advertisements appeared, the United States invaded Vietnam and left; the Soviet Union crumbled and China rose; the whole nation stopped smoking.

We never did find the essence of infinity — at least not yet.