dos-1

Also known by the technical designation in the acronym for long-duration orbital station, to the public and press the first launch of the Salyut (Салют, salute or a hail of fireworks) programme occurred on this day in 1971, becoming the first space station (see also) from the Soviet Union and was aloft, crews conducting experiments, astronomical observations and docking manuevers until October when deorbited and replaced by the new generation module, The final vessel of the programme (DOS-8), called Zvezda, became the core of the Russian section of the International Space Station.

off we go!

On this day in 1961, a Vostok I spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome under the call sign Кедр (Siberian Cedar, see also) piloted by Yuri Gagarin (Гагарин, Юрий *1934 - †1968), the first human to journey into outer space (previously), holding a short dialogue with flight operations during take-off. Mission control over the radio announced: “Preliminary stage… intermediate… main… Lift-Off! We wish you a good flight. Everything’s all right.” To which Gagarin replied, “Поехали! Goodbye, until soon, dear friends.” The enthusiastic interjection becoming a popular expression for Soviet progress and the start of the Space Age. Once the final stage of the rocket finished firing, the craft and cosmonaut orbited the Earth for one hundred-eight minutes, ejecting from the vessel during re-entry over Kazakhstan and descending to the ground safely harnessed to a parachute.

nüẉa

Framing what was formerly the stuff of science-fiction into fact that’s seeming just within our reach, we are treated to a virtual fly-through tour that one architectural studio envisions for Martian habitation with the cliffside self-sustaining settlement that could eventually accommodate a quarter of a million Earthlings at Tempe Mensa (see also) with construction beginning by 2054. Learn more at the links above.

vss imagine

Expanding its fleet of suborbital space planes with a third vehicle, Virgin Galactic has commenced test flights with its chromed, mirrored craft that’s reminiscent of a space ship from Buck Rogers or Perry Rhodan and has a superb retro-future aesthetic. More at Design Boom at the link above.

7x7

a tree grows in brooklyn: a map of New York’s great perennials  

no wine before its time: an interview with the director of Orson Welles’ infamous commercial for Paul Masson’s California champagne  

foley artists: the talented individuals who help make supplemental sounds for nature documentaries  

what level of wood panelling is this: McMansion Hell yearbook 1979—previously  

riding the rails: the portfolio of Wang Fuchun (RIP), celebrated photographer best known for capturing the narrative train travel  

schwarzschild radius: the Event Horizon Telescope—previously—takes another picture of the black hole  

hempire state: New York poised to legalise cannabis

deorbit

After fifteen years of service, funding running out its orbit degrading and the International Space Station crewed for the first time, on this day in 2001 over the course of five hours, Mir (previously) was decommissioned by a series of manoeuvres that caused the craft to graze the upper atmosphere and break up over the southern Pacific Ocean. Though no significant debris hit land or populated areas, residents in New Zealand and Japan were told to stay indoors as no object of this size had been subject to re-entry prior.

7x7

møbler, belysning, rumdesign: another dip into the iconic designs of Verner Panton—see previously  

fortuitous numbers: a few sums with the rare property where a number equals its letter count multiplied together 

avondklok: a photo-essay on the curfew in Amsterdam during the heights of the pandemic  

digital only trainers: Gucci is selling a virtual sneaker for augmented reality photographs  

yoshizawa-randlett system: rocket scientists and engineers are turning to origami for inspiration 

screen-time: a comic panel from 1997 about high school in 2021 A.D., see also

in memoriam: a pair of obituaries celebrating the life and work of designer Zeev Aram from Things Magazine

6x6

gambrinus/ninkasi: five-thousand-year old industrial scale brewery in Egypt makes archaeologist rethink the history of beer, previously believed only to be made on a large scale with Christian monasteries  

star-fiend: one member of the pool of “human computers” realised that there were galaxies beyond our own by studying depth of field on photographic plates with a magnifying glass rather than a telescope  

pod squad: whales collaborated and learned to outsmart their human hunters in the nineteenth century—via Kottke, blogging for twenty-three years now 

dyi: join Van Neistat, The Spirited Man, for some fantasy fixing  

maslenitsa: celebrating Shrovetide ahead of Orthodox Lent  

vier-farben-satz: Colorbrewer generates ideal schemes for maps and data visualisations

mir eo-18

Becoming one of the founding mission specialists that would establish the space shuttle programme in 1979 and subsequently flying four missions on board Challenger, Atlantis and Discovery, NASA astronaut Norman Earl Thagard became on this day in 1995 the first US citizen to reach Earth orbit in a Russian craft (see also), traveling with the crew of the Soyuz TM-21 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, effectively the first American cosmonaut for his fifth and last spaceflight. As researcher, Thagard spent six months aboard the space station Mir conducting a battery of experiments and presently teaches engineering and acts as a technical advisor for filmmakers producing space-based movies.

8x8

topsy-turvy: the architecture of the upside-down  

forever blowing bubbles: the symbols of Wall Street, capitalism protest art  

hashtag hastings: remix your own Bayeux Tapestry (previously)—via Kottke 

sit, ubu, sit: Pablo Picasso called the injured owl he discovered and nursed back to health by that name partly out of assonance with ‘hibou,’ French for hoot, and the obnoxious Alfred Jarry character  

voyager station: orbiting cruise ship set to open as early as 2027—via the always excellent Nag on the Lake 

0 bby or star wars retrofitted: remastering the franchise with references to what’s been revealed in the past four decades  

tailpipe: visualising carbon dioxide emissions through a driving game—via Waxy  

bright and airy: an inside-out concept residential project with lots of ventilation

dare mighty things

Via Super Punch—and our thanks for letting us revisit a pretty incredible moment when Perseverance touched down—we have this flowing dress (see also) inspired by the Martian rover’s parachute, whose unfurled patterns encoded an inspiring, rewarding message. Mission planners and scientists have been dropping the motto in press-releases for some time, including a feature on Curiosity (the openings in that rover’s wheels spelled out JPL, Jet Propulsion Labs just as the hem of the dress, outer ring of the parachute gives the facility’s coordinates) with the same title back in 2013 but it’s really enjoyable to see it all come together.

In the spirit of a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, the invocation first appeared in an address (“The Stenous Life,” 1899) by Theodore Roosevelt: “Far better is it to dare might things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much—because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory not defeat.” Find out about more Easter eggs on the manifest, including an emblem of the Rod of Asclepius in deference to the present pandemic on Earth.

lph-8

Occupying a liminal space between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the juncture that went with cosmic opera in one direction and dread aliens in the other, the environmental-themed, weakly-endorsing techno-utopia Silent Running by Douglas Trumbull—released on this date in 1972—does resound with our times and the bleak climate catastrophes we are facing, nearly fifty years on. The film follows a resident botanist (Bruce Dern) on board a greenhouse just beyond the orbit of Saturn, maintaining specimens of Earth’s plant life for its eventual reseeding the planet after all native trees and crops went extinct. Disobeying an order from the corporate headquarters that sponsored the space ark project to jettison their living cargo and return to commercial services, the botanist with his three service robots try to save the last biosphere.

vostok-3ka no. 1

Also known by the designation Sputnik 9 (see previously), the Soviet spacecraft launched on this day in 1961 carried a complement and crew of mice, guinea pig, a dog called Chemushka (“Blackie”) and a realistic human dummy, mannequin called Ivan Ivanovich (the equivalent of Joe Doe or Max Mustermann) that was so distressing uncanny thus prompting technicians to affix a label to his visor lest someone finding Ivan after a mission might not mistake him for an incapacitated cosmonaut or extra-terrestrial. Ivan was auctioned off after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and purchased by Ross Perot, who subsequently donated him to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The mission only consisting of a single trip around the world, it was deorbited shortly

and there’s no one there to raise them—if you did

Released as a single on this day in 1972 from the studio album Honky Château, the song parenthetically titled I think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, the narrative lyric was inspired by elements of the eponymous short story by Ray Bradbury in his The Illustrated Man collection and David Bowie’s 1969 “Space Oddity,” the pieces all triangulating on the lament that astronauts were no longer heroes and that space travel was becoming routine, mundane.

1972-012a

While perhaps not as celebrated as its more charismatic follow-on missions of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, launched on this day in 1972, was the first space probe travel beyond the asteroid belt and went on to study Jupiter and became the first object to achieve escape velocity to leave the Solar System and wander the interstellar medium. As foundational as the mission was, the Pioneer programme is overshadowed by its successors partly as it went silent in 2003. Designed by Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan and Frank Drake, Pioneer and its sister probe bear the pictured plaque, should it ever be discovered by intelligent extra-terrestrials. If left undisturbed (canonical Star Trek has Klingons destroying it as target practise), Pioneer is on a trajectory to pass the star system Aldebaran in Taurus in about two million years, which is believed to host a super-Jupiter exoplanet.

6x6

bohemian to brocore: a non-exhaustive list of aesthetics—via Things Magazine 

billions and billions: a picture of the night sky that contains a petabyte of data 

fairy wren for scale: an ornithological chart comparing the diversity of body-size among our feathered friends

https://jeffreycombs.tumblr.com/post/622945915961065473/1-second-of-every-star-trek-tos-episode-enjoy

the hook shot: a fun and welcome example of chindōgu, the Japanese art of unuselessness 

satana lero wapezeka ndiwe edzi: the musical stylings of Gaspar Nali 

the city on the edge of forever: pictured also courtesy of Things Magazine, one second from every episode of Star Trek TOS by the franchise’s frequent guest star

your daily demon: andrealphus

Possibly conflated with a similarly plumed Babylonian god called Adrammelech whom apparently was only appeased by child sacrifice, this sixty-fifth spirit and infernal marquis ruling thirty legions presents as cacophonous peacock. Once in control of the exorcist, Andrealphus’ virtue is to make people wise in geometry, mensuration and astronomy and can also conjure others into the form of a bird. Governing from this day until 13 February, Andrealphus’ foil is the Gabrieline archangel Damabiah.

happy martian new year

For a host of arbitrary and capricious reasons—the same that plague and beset our own terrestrial time-keeping buoyed by a compelling amount of research, observation and calculation to synchronise our calendars and fix our neighbouring planet to a chronological and epochal marker, today marks Year 36, falling on the Red Planet’s vernal equinox. MY 1 coincided with 11 April 1955 here on Earth when astronomers were first able monitor and to study the seasonal changes to the landscape in depth and could better articulate what was going on. Because a day on Mars (Sol) is a bit longer than our own and because of the planet’s superior orbit, it takes twice as long to circle the sun, hence only at MY 36. The probe Tianwen1 will join a number of other steadfast explorers to celebrate.

x/1106 c1

First observed on this evening in 1106 and visible in the night sky for six weeks before fragmenting into many smaller pieces and heading back out into the Solar System, corroborated by astronomers in China, Japan, Korea, Continental Europe, Wales and England, the Great Comet was regarded as a highly portentous omen. Returning in 1882, it is now classified as a member of the Kreutz Group of sungrazing comets (Sonnenstreifer, Sonnenkratzer, namesake of Heinrich Carl Friedrich Kreutz who studying their orbit and periodicity, determined that they were all related phenomenon), approaching close enough to the Sun at perihelion that they are prone to being broken up or made to evaporate entirely. Though no particular boon nor doom is directly associated with the Great Comet’s appearance, such documented observances synchronise and coordinate ancient calendars.

cosmic bowl

Declaring that geometry preceded the origin of things and “was coeternal with the divine mind” and supplying God with the patterns for creation, our old friend Johannes Kepler was eager to insert and integration harmony and mathematics into the accepted world view and contrived a model that the famed astronomer believed would fully describe the Universe through a set of perfectly aligned shapes within one another.

To this end, in February of 1596 Kepler sought the patronage of Friedrich von Württemberg to not only forward his vision with continued studies and publications but also create an artifice and artefact as a demonstration—his model of the Cosmos set in silver with the planets cut of precious stones and dispense alcohol that corresponded to the celestial bodies on tap through unseen pipes—Mercury paired with brandy and Mars a vermouth &c. Wanting to compartmentalise the labour however of the craftsmen he commissioned and not failing to realise that the orbits of the planets were not spherical but rather ellipses, the pieces did not fit together as planned. Mortified by his mistake, Kepler redoubled his efforts and though not completely forsaking his quasi-mystical theories arrived on his revolutionary laws of planetary motion and moved away from the belief in the perfection of circular motion which the Copernican model espoused, culminating in three laws that still hold to this day.