Snapshots Of Earth, Captured By Apollo 16 Astronauts On This Day In 1972.

I came up for the idea for this one while looking out of my airplane window. In the last two years, I’ve travelled a lot, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. I don’t like the feeling of being away from home, and feeling slightly lost. But I love the feeling of having nothing to do but letting my mind wander, and thinking about places I’ve never been before. This piece is inspired by that mellow feeling ~

Space history

It’s a hobby of mine to listen to and watch archives from the Apollo era.

There’s many places where you can just browse transcripts and video archives, but I’d recommend https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ and https://apollo17.org.

Watching some of the videos from that time is eerie, because these people are so distant and isolated on this dark surface, illuminated by an inclined sun.

Space shuttle concept art from Rockwell International, late 1970s.

The Shuttle Atlantis seen in silhouette during solar transit, May 12, 2009. Image by NASA/Thierry Legault.

(NASA)

Social instincts are a biological extension to this underlying love that we experience and as a side effect it is useful for our survival. I can think of a few cases where asexually reproducing animals show love for each other. Remember also that love comes in many kinds and not just romantic/sexual.

Listen to me when I say that love isn’t something that we invented. It’s observable, powerful. It has to mean something.

INTERSTELLAR (2014) dir. Christopher Nolan

The view of and from Bruce McCandless while conducting the first untethered EVA and preliminary test-flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) on February 12, 1984. Bruce ventured approximately 320 feet from the orbiter.

NASA Astronaut Anna Fisher photographed by John Bryson for Life Magazine, May 1985.

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

If humans aren’t meant to travel to other planets then why does my skeleton feel too heavy to exist comfortably in Earth gravity???? Explain that sweaty