Showing posts with label colonies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colonies. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Sunday Space: A Look Back at NASA
Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday (it's oppressively hot and humid here in the upper midwest!). Here's a few videos looking back at NASA over the last several decades. The first is film from the 1970s on space colonization. It's fun to see the optimism of what might have been.
This next clip is from a recent CBS News report on a great exhibit on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. NASA Art: 50 Years of Exploration.
If you've ever been, you may recall the incredible murals there illustrating the wonder and excitement of the program in it's heyday. This latest exhibit includes pieces by such artists as Annie Leibovitz, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, and Jamie Wyeth.
If you can't make it to D.C., there's also a book of the exhibit.
Props to Boing Boing for the colony video, and to my father-in-law for alerting me to the CBS news report.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Colonies in Space: Inspiration Realistic and Fantastic
Space colonies are the pinnacle of non-terrestrial habitation in space. It's far trickier to build your world than it is to land on with the keys already in the ignition. I'd done a previous post on colonies--even reused a few images (man do I love the orange death star!) but I wanted to focus on a few different ones for this post. I suppose you could separate them into two categories: realistic futurism (that is to say design concepts by artists and engineers for exploratory purposes) and Hollywood's interpretation.
My point with this series hasn't been to be exhaustive--that is to track down every space or moon base in pop culture. Rather, just to share some art that I think is really cool.
Let's start with the realistic (images courtesy of NASA image archives). Many of these show large agricultural parcels to feed their on-board populations, much like the way the pioneers needed to become self-sustaining:
Here's a few concepts designed for TV and film, toys, books, comics, etc. that may or may not have made it the screen. They didn't need to be accurate in order to wow viewers, but a few--like Babylon 5--have gone the extra mile to include solar panels, centrifuges, shuttle bays, hydroponics facilities, etc.
The Valley Forge was technically a ship, but it serves very much as a colony of sorts...
Probably the most famous space colony in science fiction...
Just for kicks, here's a huge graphic comparing scale between space stations, spaceships, and other intergalactic craft, both real and imagined.
Resources
My point with this series hasn't been to be exhaustive--that is to track down every space or moon base in pop culture. Rather, just to share some art that I think is really cool.
Let's start with the realistic (images courtesy of NASA image archives). Many of these show large agricultural parcels to feed their on-board populations, much like the way the pioneers needed to become self-sustaining:
Here's a few concepts designed for TV and film, toys, books, comics, etc. that may or may not have made it the screen. They didn't need to be accurate in order to wow viewers, but a few--like Babylon 5--have gone the extra mile to include solar panels, centrifuges, shuttle bays, hydroponics facilities, etc.
The Valley Forge was technically a ship, but it serves very much as a colony of sorts...
Some Disney concepts...
Probably the most famous space colony in science fiction...
Just for kicks, here's a huge graphic comparing scale between space stations, spaceships, and other intergalactic craft, both real and imagined.
Resources
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
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