New Mars Forums

NASA expects to spend $25 billion to design, build, test and fly the spaceships. That includes buying four ships for about $730 million each.

OS ANGELES, Nov. 10 - Laurie Anderson has often made futuristic technology a defining feature of her performances. The video for her crossover 1980 pop hit, "O Superman," depicted her trademark gadget: a mouth light that emitted a brilliant beam as she sang in a robotic, computer-modulated voice. "Songs and Stories From Moby-Dick" (1999), one of her most elaborate productions, toured with 40 tons of video, sound and light gear, including digital musical instruments that she helped design.

Advertisement

So when she received a call in 2002 from someone who claimed to be from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, asking her to be the space agency's first "artist in residence," she hung up the phone. "I was sure it was a fan who had figured out my secret dream," she said.

Ms. Anderson recounted the episode during a performance of "The End of the Moon" in Los Angeles this past weekend, the creative result of her "secret dream" come true - a two-year stint as the agency's official artist. With a commission of $20,000, Ms. Anderson was given access to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center in California and more.

For someone with such high-tech inclinations, "Moon" is an unusually simple production. The effects are controlled by a Macintosh laptop. The only flashy gadget visible is a "lipstick camera," a tiny device that she briefly places on the bow while playing her violin. The view from this perspective is projected onto a screen onstage, and the audience sees Ms. Anderson's instrument as if it were a planet of its own, with the bow as a trajectory toward the glaring spotlights as distant stars.

On Saturday at a hotel in Westwood, Ms. Anderson - a waifish, intense 57-year-old whose chaotic hairdo flares like a sun's corona - suggested that her residency was by turns inspiring and frustrating. Wide-eyed, she described her visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to witness the January rover landing: "It was exhilarating, because of the happiness. They were genuinely thrilled with their machine: the beauty of it, as it bounced. It really made you cry. It's very hard to get there."

"There" being Mars.

At times, she said, she found herself so overwhelmed with information that she could not keep up. "I felt like an unprepared journalist,'' she said. "None of the right paper or pencils or tape recorders. They would tell me this stuff - what kind of vehicle and how fast it was - and I would go 'Oh, great. O.K. Well, wow! That was fast!' "

Getting to know NASA researchers was difficult, though. She could not remember the names of any of the scientists that she met during her residency, she said, except for a nanotechnology specialist who canceled his appointment with her after she traveled cross-country to meet with him. "I had a feeling he was super shy,'' she said. "I just wish he would have mentioned that before."

Bertram Ulrich, curator of the NASA Art Program, said in a telephone interview that the agency had long commissioned work from artists in various media. The agency's collection includes pieces by the photographer Annie Leibovitz, the painters Robert Rauschenberg and Norman Rockwell, and a composition by Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet. All have been paid very modest amounts.

Ms. Anderson, though, is the first performance artist to work with NASA, and Mr. Ulrich said the agency chose her because "we were trying to embrace new art forms and diverse audiences.

"She travels around the country, so she's reaching out to more audiences and exposing them to NASA programs than if she made an object like a painting." The Los Angeles performance, for example, fell near the midpoint of a 36-city tour that will end at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Feb. 2 to March 6. (Her schedule is posted at www. pomegranatearts.com.)

Yet the nature of NASA's exposure in Ms. Anderson's work may not be what the agency bargained for. In conversation, she diplomatically stated, "As depressed as I am politically, I can still think of NASA's big projects and cheer myself up," but her show is poetically critical of the space program, particularly regarding its ties to the military.

Onstage, in a haunted voice, she pointed out that those next-generation space suits are "being adapted for work on earth. For soldiers. They won't be going to space. Instead they'll being going out into the desert, out into the war."

And the show's title alludes to a scene in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War" (2003) in which former the Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara disclosed that during the Cuban missile crisis, the United States considered testing nuclear weapons on the dark side of the moon. Sounding flabbergasted, she asked, "Can things like that just happen without anybody knowing?" Her "biggest fear," she added, is to look at the moon and see "a strategic air command."

Ms. Anderson was 22 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, an event she remembers with mixed emotions. Sipping a cup of tea a few hours before her Saturday performance, she said: "This was a military maneuver. It's not like I'm shocked that the military has a lot to do with NASA. They're always the first out on any frontier. So I felt a combination of thrill - just plain thrill: We got there. And fear, realizing that this was a race. We got there because we were competing for dominance."

Mr. Ulrich spoke cautiously when asked how he felt about Ms. Anderson's criticisms of NASA. "The thing with Laurie is, you have to take her within the context of the work that she's doing,'' he said. "And her mind works very much the same way a scientist's would. They're both reaching out to try to understand what's unknown."

Near the beginning of her show, she described a conversation with the NASA official who chose the pink-and-blue color scheme for the Hubble photographs of the universe. (Some of the tints picked up by instruments could not be seen by the human eye.) When she asked him how he had chosen those colors, he innocently said, "We thought people would like them."

She paused for moment, and then continued: "It looked like Tiepolo. It looked like a painting of - heaven."

Battlefields past and future: Veterans Day — the 11th day of the 11th month — provides an opportunity to reflect on the wars of the past. You can fuel your reflections by clicking through the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, then watch a Webcast of the observance at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington starting at 1 p.m. ET Thursday.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, U.S. soldiers are hoping that their technological edge can translate into success. One of the best and most up-to-date resources on the technology of warfighting is Defense Tech, maintained by Noah Shachtman. Today, Shachtman announces the launch of Defense Tech 3.0, now published under the aegis of Military.com.

"Readers can expect an expanded roster of news, tidbits, rumors and analysis about the future of national security. We're also setting up a forum, so you can discuss the latest in military technology, defense news and security trends," Shachtman says.

Among this week's top links: Slate's on-the-scene report about "the Watchdogs of Fallujah," a Marine unit that is using camera-equipped robot planes to look out for insurgents on the Iraqi city's streets. The prose reads like a sci-fi novel in the style of "Starship Troopers," but the subject is deadly serious.

There's also an update from Aerospace Daily on the near-space surveillance technology that could be fast-tracked for Iraq. JP Aerospace had been involved in the project, but after the company's Ascender airship was damaged by high winds in Texas, the project was relocated to Oregon, the publication reports.

When the U.S. Air Force Space Battlelab recruited  Global Solutions for Science and Learning as a new partner, JP Aerospace reportedly bowed out of the project. A redesigned airship is due to get its first flight tests next May, Aerospace Daily reports.

NASA expects to spend $25 billion to design, build, test and fly the spaceships. That includes buying four ships for about $730 million each.

Last year, its central mechanism, called a Z-pinch, fused isotopes of hydrogen to create nuclear fusion.

A first look at the measurements of Titan's atmosphere during the fly-by suggest that the "Atmosphere Model" we developed and used to design the Huygens probe is valid and all looks good for the probe release on Christmas day and descent to the surface on 14th January 2005.