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T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
The MoonArk.
00:31:47
Carnegie Mellon University designed the MoonArk, a collaborative sculpture project that is as much a work of art as an engineering marvel to go to the Moon.
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You're listening to the N2K space network.
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On January 8, 2024, the United States launched a commercial mission to the moon. In that mission, Astrobotic was aiming to be the first company to land on the lunar surface. Among the payloads aboard the Astrobotic Peregrine was a Carnegie Mellon University designed collaborative sculpt project called the Moon Arc. That is as much a work of art as it is an engineering marvel. So what is the Moon Arc and why does it matter? Welcome to T Minus deep space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmazes. My guest today is Mark Baskinger, the director of the Joseph Belay center for Design Fusion, Product track Chair and a professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Mark was one of the leads in the Moon Arc project. And while the sculpture didn't make it to the moon on this attempt, as the saying goes, it's really about the journey more than the destination. And we wanted to learn more about this remarkable project from those that designed it.
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My name is Mark Baskinger. I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I chair our undergraduate program in Industrial Design within the School of Design. And I'm also the director of the Joseph Ballet center for Design Fusion, which is an agile outreach arm bringing design training across campus and outward to organizations. And then I think the third leg of what I do is director of the Carnegie Mellon moonarch project, which is what we're going to talk about today.
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Yes, and thank you so much for joining me. Let's talk about the moonarch. This is so fascinating. Please tell me about this.
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Sure. The Moon Arc project began around 2008 under the leadership of former dean and faculty member Lowry Burgess, who is a well accomplished space artist. CMU at the time was transforming robotics efforts from vehicles, earthly vehicles, to outer space vehicles, landers and so forth, and had spun off a company called Astrobotic and. Oh yes, yeah. And in the process of standing up that company, they were competing for the Google Lunar X Prize. And there were hundreds of teams I believe at the time that entered that competition. And that was largely aimed at getting a vehicle on the moon with imaging capabilities to document about 500 meters of the moon. And the first team to send back images, high res images, would win the competition and tens of millions of dollars. I think what most people learned off the bat is that the prize money was only a portion of the expenses of what it would take to get to the moon. So in Astrobotics standing up as a payload delivery service and vehicle fabricator, CMU took the posture of saying, you know, this can't just be a robotics and scientific effort. We need to think about culture and the humanities and how do we bring campus for the first time to the moon through this, this company? And what statement are we making about the integration of the arts and the humanities along with the sciences and technologies? So Lowery and some faculty members at the time, some students, originated this idea that eventually became the moon arc. It was a reliquary of human experience and it was very primitive back in those days. A variety of metal disks that would have been engraved with some information and sent to the moon for posterity for someone in the distant future to discover and read. What we learned early on is that, you know, you get one shot at the moon, so you might as well make it as grand as you can. Our design team really pushed the limits of fabrication technology and materiality and what space faring apparatus might actually be. And so we just sort of took it to the perimeters of what was acceptable, and then we moved beyond that. And so in the years since, the space industry has changed, the rule set has accommodated a greater variety of artifacts that can go into space. But early on, we had the initiative to kind of do no harm, that anything that we would put on the moon would leave the smallest material trace possible, have the least ecological or environmental implications to get there. So hyper light taking less fuel, culturally rich and ecologically sound. So, you know, there's space faring parameters and then there's these other issues that we heat on top to, to have that narrative, that complex narrative really be the focus of the project.
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And gosh, when I think of similar things like the pioneer plaques or the Voyager golden dis and things like that, it is an incredible set of decisions that have to be made. Very purposeful decisions of what to include, what not to include, the design. The moon arc is beautiful. It is a beautiful object. Can you tell me about the actual design of it? Because it is just a gorgeous. It's gorgeous, sure.
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Much of the design came from two competing agendas. One, you know, being hyper light. And we were afforded initially 3 ounces of payload space. We netted out around 10. And we had to negotiate up in weight over time because 3 ounces really doesn't get you much. But you know, to send 10 ounces to space, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel costs and logistics. And that's not fabrication costs at all. So, you know, we, we really took that to heart. Like it has to be very light. So taking a skeletonized approach, an open frame chamber, an exoskeleton of sorts, that would protect the content, the more fragile contents within. So really the competing agenda for hyper lightness is cultural weight and how much can we put in? And not just by volume, but impactful, meaningful stuff that someone in the future would want to uncover and want to make sense of. And what stories might we tell? We use the analogy of poetry. Like we could write an encyclopedia, but no one wants an encyclopedia. A poem leaves enough imaginative space, but what's not there. And it gives space for someone to fill in as they read and interpret it. So for us, Lunar was a poem. And so deciding what would go in, what might stay out, what might be used for a future mission that speaks to that artifact and so forth really drove the design. But in general, we used Platonic solids. We based a lot of the shape grammar around the pentagon. Five sidedness was really important to us for two respects. One is that we have five fingers on our hands. And this is very much a set of handmade objects and talking about our creative capacity as humans. The hands are really where the brain interacts with the world. A lot of the work that went into Moon Earth was creative practice, whether it was writing or sculpture, visuals and so forth, handmade. And so that was important. And that really was a secondary narrative for us. The primary one. We looked at, you know, what is Earth, and this is a message coming from Earth to the moon. And in looking at Platonic solids, we landed on the icosahedron. And the icosahedron is a very plankton like shape. And we looked at plankton as the largest biomass on the planet and which really gave rise to the rest of life. Without plankton filtering air, creating oxygen, cleaning, the ocean would be in a different place. So there's a symbiotic relationship that we have to plankton. A very, very large biomass which outnumbers and outweighs humanity. But our relationship to plankton and what it does for us all hinges on the relationship of Earth to Moon. So the moon moving, the tides and the oceanic relationships, really, that's the symbiosis that is the underpinning of why moon arch exists and why the shape grammar is there. So the icosa tedron, when you cut it in a particular way, becomes a pentagon. And so now we've got this inside, outside shape language to components on the inside that reference plankton of exoskeletal shapes that, you know, reference the pentagon and so forth. And so we're hoping that someone in the distant future can put these shapes together and say, hey, you know, this kind of looks like this. I wonder if those folks, way back when we're talking about this relationship, and then if they unpack the moon arc, they'll see more concrete narratives that you stitch us to that and talk about the greater situation of humanity on our planet.
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Yeah. Okay. Can you tell me about what's in moon arc? I mean, I love the phrase that you said that the moon arc is a poem and that you're inviting the future discoverer in. So, yeah, what will they discover? It's such a fascinating idea.
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Yeah, sure. The moon arc is four separate chambers. We have the Earth chamber, which is speaking to our natural context, the larger situation for humanity in nature. Then we go to the metasphere, which is the communication structures and the technologies that exist between the surface of the Earth and the surface of the moon that today are shaping what it's like to be human, how we communicate, the information we consume and so forth, and the apparatus that allow that to happen. Then we get into the moon chamber. The moon chamber is really a museum in its own right. It's an homage to the Moon, looking across time and space and culture. Different poetic statements, whether they're written, visual, sculptural, in homage to the Moon as a creative muse. And then beyond that is the ether chamber. And that really speaks to everything that exists outside of our solar system. It's sort of the unknown, like it's the known unknown. And when you stack the chambers together, it really is a bit of a silhouette of a human, an abstraction of humans that, you know, the lowest chamber being the Earth chamber, that's our boots on the ground. And the ether chamber is our head looking up at the stars and contemplating. And so the content, the physical structures in the moon are nearly identical through the four chambers. There's an exoskeleton. There are four sapphire disks that have engraved platinum on them with high resolution images that scale to about 12,000 dots per inch. So very high resolution platinum deposits. We have titanium rings with engraved music. We also have five what we call microchambers. They're gold tube bevels that are vacuum Laser, laser welded vacuum chambers that have physical contents in them. So within each chamber There are 10 of those. And so those are the consistent elements. They're identical. Those structures, what's on them are different. There are nickel cobalt murals with some proprietary coatings for color that are circumnavigating the disks and the structure. And they're all. Each, each chamber is held together by a stanchion, which is a very sculptural depiction that changes through each. So we have consistent elements across each chamber and then we have particulars for each. But yeah, and so the earthly stuff is very, very concrete. We have rock samples and water samples from the five oceans and depictions of maps of the largest migrators. And this is really Earth to moon and what the moon does to stir life on Earth and how life is unfolding. Then as we get to the ether chamber, we get into more abstract relationships. We're looking at concentrations of many different pollen, many different tree saps, many different dirts, many different waters. And so there are these amalgamations that talk to the integration of different life forms on our planet and the symbiosis that happens. And so if the Earth chamber is a very literal depiction of what are the animals and how do they live together and what is the context of humanity? The ether chamber by comparison is really about the abstract, abstract contemplations of what is human in the greater context of the universe and the greater context of life forms on Earth.
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We'll be right back.
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Equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra Speed slower above 40gb on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details. I'm looking at the sort of visual exploded view on the Moon Arts website. As you're describing it, it's a beautiful object of art, but that with so much meaning in there, it's just. Sorry, I'm a little speechless because there's just so much to it and it makes me think so much about the what we're choosing to place in these incredible places like the moon. I know that was not the final destination for the space bound one, but there is a version of it in the Smithsonian, as it should be, but also just that broader conversation of its intent to be on the moon. And we're at this place now where we are attempting or in some cases successfully putting more and more landers on the moon, and we are bringing our humanity with us to the moon and what we want to leave for future generations to find and how purposeful we need to be about this. This is so purposeful and so beautiful. And beauty is not something that often I think of when we think of things we put on the moon. But it's so wonderful to see beauty being sent there. Sort of almost like holding up a mirror to the moon. That has inspired humanity since time immemorial. An object of appreciation. I'm sorry, I'm waxing poetic myself, because I'm just. This is so beautiful. This is so wonderful. It's like we're giving the moon her flowers. It's so lovely.
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It's a love letter to the moon in a way. And it's an aspirational object because at its very core, there's a belief and a hope that humanity will persist. And so if we've designed it to last hundreds of thousands of years, then we hope humans are designed to last hundreds of thousands of years. And. Yeah, right. And that speaks a bit of the complexity that, you know, poetry, like I said, leaves space for the imagination to fill in, and the narrative has many, many gaps in it, so that the human experience in that day of the distant future can fill it in and make sense of it according to their culture, to their experience, and so forth, Much like what we do with long lived architecture and archaeological finds. We make sense of it in our context, and that's really important. So it's not about getting a truth that has to persist and someone needs to know this in the future. No, we're inviting people to discover us and learn who we are today as a global society and understand that there are things that bind us all together in the human experience that should be celebrated. And for them at that distant date to uncover a little bit of that poetic about humanity today, which I think is kind of special. And so, yeah, it's dense, it's super articulate inside, meaning that it's like it's built like a cathedral. Each of these chambers has as much information as a cathedral does. And you think, like, why do cathedrals take. Or why did they take, you know, decades and decades to complete? Or in the case of, you know, Gaudi's masterpiece in Barcelona, it's still being completed completed. And, yes, these are epic efforts that bring people together through the experience. And one thing that we really wanted to say is that in that we are all now existing in the time of Moon art, Lunar was created. And for those of us who were very, very close to the project, it was the center of our creative practice for about the last 15 or 16 years.
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But.
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Viewing everyone as living in the time of Lunar, this is our cathedral. And for those of us who are closer to the story or a greater team across the world, like, this is the moment of something that they contributed to that's much larger than all of us. And it's not the greatest, most grand gesture in the world, but it's a step towards more grand gestures that we can make as a cooperative to start to talk about, again, what unites us and what brings us together as people across this planet.
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I think that's an incredible discussion to be having. And I hope we see. I mean, this is not a small effort. As you said, it took many, many years. I hope we see more efforts like this continuing. And I mean, to me, this is what being human is all about. Is this kind of beauty and thoughtfulness into what we're doing. I have to ask. I mean, we are putting more landers on the Moon. Are you involved in anything else like this, that future, looking for any future missions?
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Well, we are, in the sense that we've spoken to other space agencies that want to do similar projects. And, you know, I often said this. At the beginning of the project, our team grew from four of us in a room to about 300 people around the world. And no one ever said no when we asked them for something. And the Moon is such an attractor that of course you say yes. And one thing we had to suss out was what. What was motivating people to be part of the team? Was it ego? I want to get my piece on the Moon so I can say that I have a piece on the Moon? Or did they buy into this larger cooperative effort and the risk that's involved, too, because we weren't sure if it was going to make it. And we know how that plays out. So it's the effort and the experience. And so what I say to the other space agencies now, it's like, yeah, this is a great effort, but it's not about the artifact in its own right. It's about the process by which you bring people together to make statements and communicate about important issues or values or ethics, things that are greater than, I have a piece that I need that goes to the moon, and there it fits. Because at the end of the day, everything we put on the moon Is going to be space junk. Every lander that goes on a mission will time out when its batteries die, when the mission is over, and we have no means to reclaim it. So lunar being such a prominent cultural artifact on this maiden commercial voyage, Was aimed at making a heritage site out of the defunct spacecraft. And so we were able in the early years to begin to integrate some of the form language of moon art, to inspire some of the form language in the lander. And so once we start to see that this cultural artifact Is having visual influence on the design of the lander, we start to get shared language across, and that's important. And I think that's where we go next. I think the next version for us, our current project, we're looking at how do we integrate cultural payload into the design of the spacecraft. So it's not just payload on.
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It's payload strapped on, right?
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Yep. Yeah. You know, so we're. We're integrated, and that moves our spacecraft into cultural artifacts. And ultimately, everything we send out there will be a depiction of humanity. And if it's beautiful and functional and technologically supreme and does all the things, whoever discovers that, whether it's our future selves, Just knowing that it's out there, you know, like the vortex shirt. Right? You know. Right.
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Yes, exactly.
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But how many people have come and gone through that project? You know, the project persists over many lifetimes, and so you form your relationship to it. And there were the mechanics who built it, right. The engineers who had their hands on. On the spacecraft. And then there are those that are writing the code to keep it functional today and receiving signals from it who've never touched it, have no idea what it's. What its scale or its weight or its totality is. But they handle bond and these special artifacts that when we create them, it's a moment for us to step outside of our own individual lives and existences and to look at, like, these. These larger, shared experiences. And I think that's. That's what's special about these large projects.
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I agree. And it is. It. It is amazing to think when humanity is long, long, long gone from earth, eons from now, the voyagers will probably still be our representatives out there. So truly, let's be purposeful about what else we send out and maybe make them pretty, for lack of a better terminology. Why not?
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Well, I was going to say that I think beauty is. That's a slippery slope to Define it and describe it, but you know it when you see it. And by today's standards, we might look at Moon Arkansi. Wait. Wow. It's, like, really visually interesting, or it's beautiful, or it's, oh, it's smaller than I thought it was. You know, like, people will have a reaction to it. And so far, it's been really positive. But in the future, you know, aesthetics, aesthetic sensitivity might change, and the sensibilities that someone might have at the time might go, like, where did that come from? And so, you know, how they look at it. I think, you know, I want to be there the moment someone discovers it for the first time and has to make sense of it. And what do they gravitate towards? What's important to them? What's a discovery or what do they know? And, you know, that in its own right is poetry. And it's a hypothetical, because the reality is that, you know, there's been so much written about the project right now, and like you mentioned, it's in the Smithsonian, so there is a record. And for however long that record lasts, someone will be able to perform scholarship on it. And I'm really curious that, like, at such a distance, when there is no scholarship, when language changes, you know, when humans are just fundamentally different and how they make sense of us as, you know, these ancients, you know, that once were. I think that's really intriguing to think about.
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That's it for T Deep Space, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us@space2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. T Minus Deep Space is produced by Alice Carouse. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see.
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Sa.