First television picture from space, TIROS 1 satellite, april 1, 1960.
The launch of TIROS I (Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite) on April 1, 1960 marked the first day it became possible to observe the Earth’s weather conditions on a regular basis, over most of the world from the vantage point of outer space. [...] Read more
—Source: NOAASIS
View of Earth from a camera on V-2 #13, launched October 24, 1946.
On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful —the first pictures of Earth as seen from space. [...] read more
—Source: “The First Photo From Space” By Tony Reichhardt, Air & Space Magazine, November 1st, 2006.
Captain Ronald E. Evans (1933-1990) was a US Navy pilot and an Apollo astronaut. [...] Ronald Evans was command module pilot for the last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17. He accompanied astronauts Harrison Schmidt and Gene Cernan, and piloted the command module America in lunar orbit while Schmidt and Cernan descended to the Taurus-Littrow Valley on the lunar surface below. There they set up and operated science experiments and collected geological samples. While in orbit, Evans completed a range of scientific tasks. He recorded geological observations and, using hand-held cameras, photographed key lunar features. Read more
See also: Astronaut Bio: Ronald E. Evans, NASA
The world’s first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The photo was transmitted to Earth by the United States Lunar Orbiter I and received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain. This crescent of the Earth was photographed August 23, 1966 at 16:35 GMT when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit and just about to pass behind the Moon.
—Source: NASA
[December 29, 1968] This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Earth is about five degrees left of the horizon in the photo. The unnamed surface features on the left are near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Height of the photographed area at the lunar horizon is about 175 kilometers.
—Source: NASA
Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts; Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8. Lovell said, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.
The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.
– KIMMELMAN, Michael (2008). «Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82», New York Times, 14 mai.
11 mars 1942 – Si j’essaie d’approfondir cette «honte prométhéenne», il me semble que son objet fondamental, l’«opprobre fondamental» qui donne à l’homme honte de lui-même, c’est son origine. T. a honte d’être devenu plutôt que d’avoir été fabriqué. Il a honte de devoir son existence – à la différence des produits qui, eux, sont irréprochables parce qu’ils ont été calculés dans les moindre détails – au processus aveugle, non calculé et ancestral de la procréation et de la naissance. Son déshonneur tient donc au fait d’«être né», à sa naissance qu’il estime triviale (exactement comme le ferait le biographe d’un fondateur de religion) pour cette seule raison qu’elle est une naissance. Mais il a honte du caractère obsolète de son origine, il a bien sûr également honte du résultat imparfait et inévitable de cette origine, en l’occurrence lui-même.
– ANDERS, Günther ([1956] 2002). L’Obsolescence de l’homme. Sur l’âme à l’époque de la deuxième révolution industrielle, éd. Encyclopédie des nuisances/Ivrea, Paris, p. 38.
In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at “Dextre the Magnificent.” Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.
Celestis, Inc.(www.celestis.com), the pioneer and global leader in Memorial Spaceflight, announced today that it has reached agreement with two companies to launch payloads containing human cremated remains to the surface of the Moon as soon as 2009.
– Celestis, Memorial Spaceflights, Luna Services, press release, March 26, 2008.
» Space burial (Wikipedia)
» Celestis (Wikipedia)
WASHINGTON - A powerful stellar explosion detected March 19 by NASA’s Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. […] “Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts”, said Swift science team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University in University Park, Pa. […] Read more…
February 29, 2008: NASA has obtained new high-resolution radar maps of the Moon’s south pole —a region the space agency is considering as a landing site when astronauts return to the Moon in the years ahead. […] read more…
– EPSTEIN, Mitch (1998). Untitled, New York, The City serie.
She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.
God is the voice that says, “I am not here.”
– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 236.
She missed those nights with friends when you talk about everything. She hadn’t stayed in close touch and felt no guilt or need. There were hours of talk and laugher, bottles uncorked. She missed the comical midlife monologues of the clinically self-absorbed. The food ran out, the wine did not, and who was the little man in the red cravat who did sound effects from old submarine movies. She went out rarely now, went alone, did not stay late. She missed the autumn weekends at somebody’s country house, leaf-fall and touch football, kids tumbling down grassy slopes, leaders and followers, all watched by a pair of tall slender dogs poised on their haunches like figures in myth.
– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 190.
– Kerry Skarbakka, Naked, 2002.
Philosopher Martin Heideggar described human existence as a process of perpetual falling, and it is the responsibility of each individual to catch ourselves from our own uncertainty. [Lire la suite...]
A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduc.
She’s heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dandling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.
Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.
– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 33
» Voir aussi Man, Falling (infra)
» JUNOD, Tom (2003). «The Falling Man», Esquire, septembre.
» Photographies de Lyle Owerko
» «The Falling Man», article Wikipedia (anglais)
She walked beneath a flophouse marquee. It read: TRANSIENTS. Something about that word confused her. It took on an abstract tone, as words has done before in her experience (although rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units that had mysteriously evaded the responsabilities of content. Tran-zhents. What it conveyed could not itself be put into words. The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped walking, turned her body completely and look once more at the sign. Seconds passed before she grasped its meaning.
– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New-York: Vintage Books, p. 207.
She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder’s name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its effort to understand and assimilate grief. There were fees for individuals, group fees, special consultation terms, charges for booklets and teaching aids, payment for family session and marital grief seminars. Most regional offices were small and located in squat buildings that also housed surgical-supply firms and radiology labs. These buildings were usually the first of a planned complex that never materialized. Pammy had visited several, for background, and the photo she took for her brochures had to be severely cropped to eliminate the field of weeds and bulldozed earth. It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed. Teams of behaviorists assembled in the sewers and conceived a band of futurism based on filing procedure. To Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seems even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partition, opened up others, moved ou file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they’d been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief.
– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 18-19.
–Alfredo Jarr, Lament of the Image, 2002
Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometime much more frequently. He wasn’t looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoy jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstraction. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercial, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best serve by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English. Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child’s conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small grey bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy. He wondered if he’d become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred. “Here, look. We’re here folks. The future has collapsed right on us. And what does it look like?” “You made me almost jump.” “It look like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It’s being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.” “Let me sleep, hey.” “See, look, I’m saying. Just as I speak. I mean it’s this. We’re sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they’ve got their loft and their cameras and it gets shown because that’s the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It use to be people waved.” “Good.” “Right here. Ri’chere, ladies and genneman. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”
– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York : Vintage Books, pp. 16-17.
Then he spread the sheet of plastic on the ground and got the coats and blankets from the cart and he took off their damp and muddy shoes and they sat there in silence with their hands outheld to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things in oblivion. Colors. The name of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.
– McCARTHY, Cormac (2006). The Road, New York : Vintage, p. 88.
In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and googles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skull. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a think take the classe with it. Turn out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
– McCARTHY, Cormac (2006). The Road, New York : Vintage, p. 28.
De toute mon existence, je ne me rappelle pas que mes rapports avec les autres aient donné un résultat autre que destructeur. J’entends par là que mon existence a non seulement affecté mes relations avec les autres, mais aussi que j’ai été anéanti par eux ou que j’ai contribué à les anéantir. J’ai été affecté de diverses façons jusqu’à ne plus croire en rien et surtout pas dans l’être humain. J’ai affecté leur existence – en supprimant leur espoir, leur vision du monde, leur sentiment, tout ce en quoi (monde des croyances et des valeurs) ils croyaient – au point qu’il n’est rien resté de ces relations. Pour dire le moins, j’ai été pour eux décevant. Mon existence n’a rien laissé – attendu qu’elle devait ou qu’elle aurait dû à tout le moins avoir quelques résultats, fussent-ils négatifs. Je ne crois pas l’avoir fait volontairement, avoir eu l’intention de détruire, mais le résultat a toujours été celui-là. Je ne crois pas non plus que les autres aient eu cette intention de me détruire. Il n’est pourtant rien resté. Ce rien, dont il est question ici, ne renvoie ni à la souffrance ni à l’absence ou à la fin de la relation. Ce rien, est-ce le résultat de relations entre personnes incompatibles, de malentendus entre elles? Est-ce le constat d’une existence particulièrement troublée? Je ne le crois pas. C’est une explication facile et habile que de renvoyer à une détresse, à une angoisse ou même à une névrose la difficulté, l’impossibilité de vivre avec les autres. Mais ce rapport à soi troublé, à quoi tient-il?
– OLIVIER, Lawrence (2008), Détruire : la logique de l’existence, éd. Liber, Montréal, pp. 11-12.
– Stephen Shore, U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973
The fast pace of life and the increasing speed of mouvement across vast American spaces, well before the beginning of the twintieth century, had begun to put a premium on quickly impressive, attractive images. They were creating a new Iconography of Speed. Competition for attention put a premium on attention-getting. The word “billboard”, which was invented in America, had first come in use about 1851, in the early days of the Graphic Revolution. The rise of the automobile, the improvement of highways in the 1920’s and ’30’s, and the consequent vast spread of billboards were now incentives to produce images that could catch the eye in a flash and remain indelibly imprinted on the memory.
– BOORSTIN, Daniel J. ([1961]1992). The Image. A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America, New York : Vintage Books, p. 199.
– One Last Ride, formal portraits by Eduardo Menz, 2007 @ Ctrllab.com
International Space University — Summer Session Program 2006
Luna Gaia posits a pathway towards new technologies, philosophies, systems applications and infrastructure aimed at achieving a closed loop habitat model for human settlement on the Moon. This report makes recommendations pertaining to the systems architecture, engineering processes, and the research, development and orchestration of separate phased precursor missions which will be required to achieve this vision by the year 2030. The framework that we propose is designed to support an ideal profile of an optimum 11 (maximum 12) member human crew on the lunar surface for a period of 18 - 36 months.
The Luna Gaia design solutions focus on the coupling power for all regenerative processes of a network of closed loop life support. Using proven and innovative solutions that produce relatively independent and highly reliable cycles of oxygen, water, energy, food growth and waste processing, the modular, hybrid bioregenerative network of systems particular to the Luna Gaia design architecture is ambitious but feasible.
This report also details ethical and philosophical considerations of lunar settlement and the wider implications for international law, policy and future interplanetary social governance. The authors intend to evolve the current status of thought and practice on these issues to consider new and responsible configurations of resource assets - on Earth and the Moon - and to inspire the will and confidence necessary to propel humanity, and its technology, towards the
next frontier of lunar settlement. The management principles are sound, the Earth-based applications are considered and the legal frameworks have been clearly defined. Certain risks are apparent but there are significant opportunities
and benefits which will occur. More importantly, the project vision is consistent with the preservation of life and responsible evolution into the solar system. […] Read more (pdf)
– Dedication without talent is useless. Understand what I mean? Dedication alone is not enough. You can starve and wanna do it… Hey! You know… And how many do that? They starve in the gutters… They don’t make it.
– But you knew you had talent.
– They all think they have! How do you know that you’re the one? You don’t know. It’s a shot in the dark. You take it or you become a normal civilized person from 8 to 5… Get married have children… Christmas together… Here comes gramma : «Hi gramma, come on in… Hi you…». You know… Sure I couldn’t take that, I would have murder myself.
– From The Charles Bukowski Tapes, Barbet Schroeder, 1987.
– Abandoned Places, un projet photographique de Henk van Rensbergen
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