Yuri's Night World Party at NASA/Ames Research Center: April 13, 2007, Part 2
http://www.ynba.org/


Burning Man Meets Space Man

The place was dazzling with flashing lights and ambient DJ music in the background. From our vantage point, you could see the entire hanger lit up with Laser Dreams' entertainment's lights. Comfortable cushions & futons were laid out, and next to the main stage a large "lighted" inflated statue called "Goodnite," by Anakin Koenig Airways sat nearby (see left image).

4 geodesic domes (Space Dome, Earth Dome, Documentary Dome & SQUID Labs), Neon-colored Stilt walkers, art platforms, painters, 12 video projectors and screens were scattered throughout the hangar and flooded our senses. Those were just the displays. The patrons were also a sight. A variety of space-age costumes were everywhere. You couldn't tell the science geeks from the artists.

On the tarmac, we saw the ChakraTron, a large Buddha with chandelier glass. Originally created for the Burning Man festival by an artist named Gaspo (see left image), the ChakraTron generates magic eight ball answers on a small monochrome LED screen when a coin is placed in its built-in donation plate. It was lit from the inside by 360 rotating LEDs controlled by 122 micro-controllers, or 122 computers. In order to create one computer controlling all the lights without hundreds of wires, the ChakraTron is actually a network connecting all the computers together. The ChakkraTron is made of thermoplastic and recycled glass. The mold itself comes from a real 17th Century Buddha from Japan that had fallen off a hill and broke, but a friend of Gaspo fixed it and used it for the main shape.

Near the airfield, a telescope was available to view the planets and stars.

Sharing the tarmac was Michael Christian's beautiful Hypha, a tall, metalwork sculpture that reaches up into space. The Playa Flies rode around the tarmac on bicycles with PVC poles and conduit for the LEDs. Also on the tarmac was D'Andre Teeter's artistic creation and Scott Gasparian's HypKnowTron (see left image), an electro-mechanical Art Installation that uses micro-controlled LED clusters to produce a 10-foot wide rotating disk of light. I watched the wheel spin around into multi-color lights making individual circles.

Floating high in the night cold air was Michael Light and Dave Rattray's Star Zipper (another LED creation). Video artists (see left image) were projecting surreal celestial images on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a mothballed C-141 aircraft. The artists had originally obtained the images from the Ames Research Center Imaging Library, a photo server I manage. They gathered different types of images from historical projects to add to what is current and made a collage related to their visuals. They performed to the music as a loose narrative.

Also, on the tarmac, the Space Cowboys joined the party. They are a dynamic lineup of DJs aboard an interstellar party transporter, or the Unimog, a multi purpose four-wheeled drive medium truck, transformed into a self-contained mobile party vehicle. Surrounding the Unimog with its fold-put projection screens, a small crowd of people danced to the trans-electronica music optically enhanced by visual artists like, Rabbit In The Moon, showcasing the "Luminescent Space Montage on the Tarmac". By midnight, the crowd had swelled to a larger audience. The Cowboys said that their "sound" was a great counter-balance to the headliners Plaid and Tefon tel Aviv, who are a little more "chill" than their standard fare.



Science and Space Onstage

My friend and fellow NASA worker Brandy Brittmer and I decided to tour inside the hangar to check out the interactive art installations, science demonstrations and acrobatic performances. High above our heads on the hanger's wall a huge NASA logo slowly changing colors to the ambiance of the music. On the main stage, Ames Center Director S. Peter Worden welcomed the audience and spoke about the Vision for Space Exploration and Ames' role. He spoke about how busy NASA is designing the Aries and Orion spacecraft, which will carry crews and cargo to the moon and Mars. Worden also promised that NASA would complete the International Space Station, an ambitious effort bringing advances in science and technology for human exploration to Mars, traditionally hostile to robotic exploration. However NASA found Mars had standing water, maybe even seas at one time, and surface liquids even now. Worden also spoke about Ames' contribution through thermal protection, data systems, supercomputing, human robotic interaction and aeronautics.

Interviews offstage for Yuri's Night web cast, Worden (see left image) was asked what it meant NASA to host the event. He said, "NASA is about is expanding a human presence into the Solar System. It all began with Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961. This is an opportunity to celebrate not only the accomplishment but to think about the future . . . to have vision for space exploration. It starts with us returning to the Moon, late next decade. We're busy now building the equipment, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Aries boosters that will take us there. Once that starts, it's going to be exciting. This time we're going to the Moon to stay . . . We started out in '61 and the next steps are now."

The first privately funded female astronaut to reach orbit as well as the first Astronaut of Iranian decent, Anousheh Anasari, started her presentation. She spoke about her week in the International Space Station and showed a short video of her space trip.







Next on stage, Dr. Chris. McKay, world-renowned expert in astrobiology and terraformation with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames Research Center McKay explained life on Mars and how we might go about finding it. "Life," he specified, "but not as we know it." He explained how we could colonize Mars without causing irreversible biological damage to any life that's already there.




After the keynotes, Brittmer and I walked around the floor and visited the interactive technologies, including the Gigapan, an explorable high-resolution panorama from around the world.



Next to the demo was the Ames World Wind, which lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Using the Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3-D, just as if you were really there.



Next page