The Mycelium Foresight Conversations: November 2022.
As announced in the October issue of our newsletter, we are in the middle of a Strategic Foresight process focusing on tourism and space leisure with Space'ibles (CNES). Today, we stay in space but...
…. but focus on art and food.
Trevor Paglen‘s Orbital Reflector
Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author, known for his artwork in the field of mass surveillance and data collection. His work was exhibited in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Barbican in London. In 2018, Trevor turned his interest to Space. He launched the Orbital Reflector, a 1.5 million dollars, 30 m-long diamond-shaped gold mylar balloon on board a Space-X rocket. The balloon was not able to deploy as planned, and the Orbital Reflector never reached the skies, however, it raised an interesting debate about the use of space.
When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.
-Trevor Paglen
LIGHT, SCULPTURES, AND A CUBESAT
Trevor Paglen‘s Orbital Reflector was a light-weighted, 30m-long diamond-shaped gold mylar sculpture developed closely with NASA for 10 years. The artist began gathering a team of academics, engineers, and aerospace experts as early as 2008 and then reached out to the Nevada Museum of Art which decided to sponsor the project.
It was launched – after multiple attempts- aboard a SpaceX Falcon-9-rocket in 2018. Once in low Earth orbit, at a distance of about 575 kilometres from Earth, the CubeSat that contained the Orbital reflector opened to release the sculpture, which should have self-inflated like a balloon. The idea is that as soon as the sunlight would have hit the sculpture, the balloon’s reflection should have been visible from Earth with the naked eye for about two months, before harmlessly burning out. However, due to a loss of contact with the ground, the US Air Force could not find which CubeSat contained the Orbital Reflector and did not authorize the release of the balloon.
Orbital Reflector encourages all of us to look up at the night sky with a renewed sense of wonder, to consider our place in the universe, and to reimagine how we live together on this planet.
-Nevada Museum of Art
WHY A SCULPTURE IN SPACE? WHY NOT?
The first reactions to Paglen’s project were profoundly negative. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in an open letter that it was“ the space equivalent of someone putting a neon advertising billboard right outside your bedroom window”. This strong reaction calls for some thoughts. As Paglen put in an interview with Artnet, “Why are we offended by a sculpture in space, but we’re not offending by nuclear missile targeting devices or mass surveillance devices, or satellites with nuclear engines that have a potential to fall to earth and scatter radioactive waste all over the place?”
The Orbital Reflector was questioning who space belongs to, and why public space should be used only for commercial or scientific purposes. If the balloon would have been a commercial or military satellite that would have been no quivers about it. However, it was “useless” art, and therefore unacceptable. Isn’t this the same principle of affirming that a forest or a natural park or a museum should not exist, because not commercially or scientifically valuable for our utility society?
This project, along with other projects such as #Laugh by Eyal Gever or the Satellite-Sculpture by Tavares Strachan, is among the first to question who has a legal right to use space and who owns the earth’s orbit. Why should scientists or commercial entities have unlimited use and control of our orbit? Why can’t artists, or any citizen for that matter, have equal access to space, given that space belongs to everyone?
The Orbital Reflector could not deploy itself, but from my point of view, this is by no means a failure. The questions it raised remain vivid. Art offers space for new thoughts, opens possibilities, and makes visible what is often simply perceived or taken for granted. Why shall we take for granted that Space is a domain with exclusive uses for science, governments, and commercial activities? The balloon itself was also incredibly poetic, like the work of Azuma Makoto who launched flower arrangements into the stratosphere around the same time. But this is another story.
About space Champagne
In a few days, the Art Basel Miami fair opens. Another opportunity for some to associate champagne and art. The shortcut is a little bit far-fetched, and the transition not so good, but it allows me to introduce another find during our scanning horizon on space tourism and leisure: the space champagne.
You will tell me: where is the innovation? After all, champagne can be found everywhere. Well, simply, it was not possible in space. It is actually not possible to have pressurized glass bottles floating in a space habitat. In fact, it took 4 years of development before Mumm (actually the French champagne maker Mumm is behind it along with a Paris-based design firm called Spade) could present a product. The whole design of the bottle had to be changed for the occasion.
Space rules require a pressurized liquid container to have a second protective layer. The outer shell of the two-layer bottle comes in aeronautical-grade aluminum to protect the glass bottle inside—glass shattering in space would be a major problem. The top of the bottle, dubbed the “service” part, features a long neck topped by a cork and a ring. This keeps the cork from popping open and helps lock the bottle’s stainless-steel mechanism.
To match the traditional champagne bottle and tasting experience as closely as possible, SPADE needed to do something about the zero-G conditions that would otherwise make the iconic champagne bottle pop impossible.
“After uncorking, when pressing the button located at the bottom of the bottle, the champagne exits through the neck and gathers in the ring that once held the cork in place,” Octave de Gaulle, the founder of SPADE, tells Dezeen. “When a sufficient amount of champagne has exited, a small movement of the wrist separates a sphere of Mumm Cordon Rouge Stellar champagne from the ring that is then gathered by our specially designed glass and ultimately tasted by the astronauts.”
And the video here.
(yet alcohol is forbidden on the ISS...)
I just realized that I promised an article about food in space, and I just mentioned alcohol. You should know that I have a bias (as you can see here). However, as I promised, I'll do it. What about space food?
From bringing food up to growing it
Food remains a major concern in space travel. It cannot be taken lightly because the safety issues are important. In a microgravity situation, food can be dispersed everywhere. To be preserved for a long time without refrigeration, they must be precooked and consumed in cans (russian preference) or in freeze-dried bags (american preference).
This is not to be taken lightly, for the people of Earth, because many of the inventions required by the conditions of life in space are now useful on Earth. And the innovations continue. A researcher at the French Center for Culinary Innovation, a laboratory at the University of Paris-Sud, Raphaël Haumont designed an encapsulation technique with chef Thierry Marx that is perfectly suited to space living conditions (but also conceivable in conventional dispensers on Earth) "It is a vegetable and edible can composed of alginate beads made from algae. Today, we can encapsulate up to 33 cl of liquid," he explains. “For long-distance flights, we need to carry as little weight as possible. But this can of the future is light, edible and biodegradable.”
The future of food in space will be less in the sandwiches concocted by great chefs (even if it remains to be continued- essentially for the beneficial psychological impact, especially during holidays or special occasions. Obviously, food is not only utilitarian for humans) but rather in what astronauts will be able to … harvest.
Here is an extract of an interview of Philippe Stefanini, researcher and doctor in biological anthropology on the subject:
NASA has contacted you to develop a food program for the Mars expedition planned for 2030. Tell us about this project.
NASA wants their astronauts to become space farmers, meaning that they produce part of their food. For this, they are studying superfoods and so-called "cultural foods" to allow them to feed themselves and survive during their mission. NASA contacted me because I invented the notion of sustainable food as a polysemic object. They are interested in these foods because they can be grown by the astronauts in the shuttle and in the Mars base.
What are these sustainable superfoods you are talking about?
Sustainable foods are nutrient-dense foods that require little water or processing to grow. For example, there's spirulina, grapes, legumes, or certain acacias. I work with the French astronaut Cyprien Verseux, chosen among the six world astronauts for the mission to Mars. We research and study these foods together. As I travel, I pass on to him all the sustainable foods I have collected so that he can bring them with him on board the space shuttle.
Another possibility and option -besides the ability to grow food by focusing on some of the most profitable foods- will certainly be 3D printed food.
That’s all for today.
Bonus
The "bonus" are the other encounters we made, below in the form of keywords.
If you read French, and have some time to spare, I suggest you read last week's Umanz newsletter. A very instructive article about the economy of content, creators, etc. Back to English, an article that raises the question of the possible future of NFT in the tourism sector. Otherwise, we've been talking about the end of passwords for a year, but they are still there...and in the meantime companies are adapting.