NEW GEOGRAPHIES 11 Extraterrestrial

Edited by Jeffrey S. Nesbit & Guy Trangoš New Geographies 11 New Geographies is a journal of design, agency, and The Moon’s Earth Extraterrestrial territory founded, edited, and produced by doctor of design candidates at the Harvard University Graduate School of LISA MESSERI Editors Design. New Geographies presents the geographic as a Jeffrey S. Nesbit & Guy Trangoš design paradigm that links physical, representational, and political attributes of space and articulates a synthetic Editorial Board scalar practice. Through critical essays and projects, the Michael Chieffalo, Mariano Gomez-Luque, journal seeks to position design’s agency amid concerns and Julia Smachylo about infrastructure, technology, ecology, and globalization.

Former Editors New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial has been made Daniel Daou, Gareth Doherty, Ali Fard, Rania Ghosn, possible with support from the Graham Foundation for Ghazal Jafari, El Hadi Jazairy, Daniel Ibañez, Nikos Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Katsikis, Taraneh Meshkani, Pablo Pérez Ramos, Antonio Petrov, Stephen Ramos, Neyran Turan All attempts have been made to trace and acknowledge the sources of images. Regarding any omissions or errors, Advisory Board please contact: Eve Blau, Neil Brenner, Sonja Dümpelmann, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Charles Waldheim New Geographies Lab Harvard University Graduate School of Design Academic Advisor 48 Quincy Street Neil Brenner Cambridge, MA 02138

Production Advisor Distribution Meghan Ryan Sandberg Actar D 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Floor Copyeditor New York, NY 10016 Elizabeth Kugler Actar.com

Proofreader Tamar Kupiec New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial would not have On December 25, 1968, hours after the crew of of us, we have only photographic postcards. In the been possible without the generous support of various Apollo 8 captured the remarkable photograph stillness of the image, the strangeness melts away Graphic Designer individuals, departments, and institutions. We must first Earthrise, astronaut Frank Borman was chatting and we are left with an eerie but familiar kinship. We Sean Yendrys acknowledge Neil Brenner, the publication’s academic with mission control. Still stunned at seeing Earth recognize the relationship between two celestial bod- advisor, for his continued intellectual guidance and from the Moon, he commented on the surprise ies because though we have not been to the Moon, moral support. We thank the Harvard GSD Publications accompanying every glance out the capsule window: we have had the experience of being emplaced and Department for their assistance in the publication “I keep expecting to be seeing the Moon.” Instead, looking up at the faint glow of a crescent companion. processes. In addition, we would like to acknowledge he was seeing Earth floating in the inky night sky. Looking at Earthrise, we—like Borman—expect to the excellent work by copyeditor Elizabeth Kugler and A bit later, Borman asked Ken Mattingly back on see the Moon but there instead floats a world. © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College graphic designer Sean Yendrys. As New Geographies Earth how the weather was at the site where the This essay presents three different views of a and Actar Publishers. All rights reserved. No part may continues into its second decade, we thank our crew would splash down. Mattingly replied, “They planet from its moon: Chesley Bonestell’s pre–Space be reproduced without permission. Distributed by colleagues on the editorial board who continue to inspire told us there is a beautiful Moon out there.” Borman Race paintings of Saturn as seen from its moons, Actar Publishers. the mission of the journal. We acknowledge and thank our faculty who serve on the advisory board for their responded, “Now, I was just saying that there’s a the first photographs circulated by NASA of Earth 1 Printed in Estonia by Printon. keen and productive feedback. Finally, this project would beautiful Earth out there.” This linguistic inver- seen from the Moon, and early 21st-century digitally not be possible without the support of the Graham sion, just like the photographic inversion offered by crafted exoplanet moonscapes produced by artist Logo design with Johannes Breyer (Dinamo) Foundation, for which we are immensely grateful. Earthrise, draws our attention to the Earth-Moon Lynette Cook. What understandings of being in the and Elias Hanzer relationship. What do we learn in seeing this rela- cosmos do these images draw out? Bonestell’s art tionship differently; how does the perspective of primed readers for human space flight, establishing ISBN: 9781948765503 Cover Image a planet from its moon shape how we think about the solar system as a place for human exploration and LCCN: 2019954925 Earthrise Seen for the First Time By Human Eyes; Photographed extraterrestrial geographies? expansion. Earthrise illustrated how Earth is not only by William Anders, Apollo 8, December 24, 1968 The experience of seeing our planet from its a world but also a planet among others. Exomoons www.gsd.harvard.edu/publications Credit: satellite must indeed have been strange for the 24 help make the invisible planets that fill our galaxy From the book and exhibition FULL MOON by Michael Light, 1999. American men who flew to the Moon. For the rest into places; a step, so say astronomers, toward ending Negative NASA; digital image ©1999 Michael Light

The color used throughout this issue is called ‘Cosmic Latte.’ It was defined in 2002 by Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry 1 (Johns Hopkins University) who averaged the color of the light Transcript available at https://history.nasa. emitted by over 200,000 galaxies. As such, it has become known gov/afj/ap08fj/20day4_orbit8.html. as the average color of the universe. 77 cosmic loneliness.2 Each image accomplishes what we and clear winter’s night. Saturn might be our focus, anthropologists state as our goal; each image makes but Titan is made fully a world for us to stand upon. the strange familiar. Referencing the experience of Even as this image makes Saturn strange, the looking up from the surface of Earth and seeing the progressive movement closer to the planet gives the Moon grounds each of these strange geographies in outer solar system a sense of familiarity. This is a a familiar, terrestrial sensibility even as they simulta- travelogue, establishing Saturn—and by association neously challenge us to imagine a cosmos filled with other planets and moons in the solar system—as a places, destinations, and relations. site of potential human experience.4 Bonestell tries to make gaseous Saturn a relatable place, depicting fluffy clouds in the high atmosphere from where, in Titan the final painting in the series, we look up to see the magnificent band of rings stretching across the sky In the May 29, 1944, issue of Life magazine, amidst like a white rainbow. And yet this composition seems articles about World War II’s impacts at home and more similar to geometric abstraction than the abroad, there is a piece of touristic escape inviting preceding romantic landscapes from which we view American readers to imagine journeying through the Saturn at a distance. Indeed, Bonestell draws directly solar system. Alongside grainy black-and-white pho- on a motif of 19th-century Romantic painters, who tographs of the nine planets, a two-page color spread placed miniscule, nearly invisible human figures presents six realistically painted views of Saturn from against their sublime landscapes.5 Inspecting more its various moons. “The pictures show the changing closely the foreground of the paintings from Saturn’s aspect of Saturn and its satellite family as it would moons Mimas and Iapetus, one sees tiny space appear to a traveler hopping toward the planet from travelers, all in white, traversing the rugged terrain. moon to moon.” Saturn and its iconic rings hang in This human presence, apparently within Bonestell’s the sky of each of these paintings, each moon provid- “reasonable fancy,” is easily missed by the viewer, ing a landscaped foreground reminiscent of the stark, whose eye is drawn upward to Saturn and its rings. imagined wildness of the American Southwest. As we To see Saturn from its moons is to make moon-hop, Saturn looms progressively larger, and in sense of a planet otherwise incomprehensible. While the last image we float above the gaseous planetary Saturn seems to have little in common with Earth, surface. Created by Chesley Bonestell (described in its rocky satellites relate to both our planet and its the article as a “Hollywood miniature-set designer and moon. It is from the lunar surface that we are shown amateur astronomer” and referred to by many since a familiar landscape. Bonestell is making the solar as the “father of space art”), the images are praised system a site of human expansion (quite literally by for being astronomically accurate and “enlivened by placing humans in these spacescapes) and thus pro- no more than reasonable fancy in the detail of satellite viding a visual aesthetic for the coming Space Race. landscapes which show in their foregrounds.”3 As one essayist has suggested, Bonestell opened up One of these paintings, Saturn as Seen from “worlds within worlds, inviting adventure, converting Titan (1944), is Bonestell’s most iconic work. It those abstract points of light into real places.”6 takes up two-thirds of a page and is notable because Saturn, rather than hanging in a black sky, hovers low in a sky whose blue hues evoke dusk. As the caption Luna in Life explains, the pigmented sky is due to Titan being the only Saturnian moon with an atmosphere. Bonestell became a prolific illustrator of potential Saturn itself is not “full” but depicted mostly in shad- celestial futures. He returned to the pages of Life ows as a thin crescent. Jagged rock formations jut in 1946 with a series of illustrations titled Trip to from Titan’s surface, framing the planet and its rings. the Moon. We travel with Bonestell’s rocket men The ground is covered in ice and snow; it is a crisp from Earth to the Moon, and upon reaching the

2 4 5 Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space: An This sense of movement was a first for the For the influence of Romanticism on Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds new field of “space art,” argues Catherine space art in general and Bonestell in par- (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Newell, “Without Having Seen: Faith, the ticular, see Elizabeth Kessler, Picturing the Future, and the Final American Frontier,” Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images 3 Astropolitics 12, nos. 2–3 (2014): 148. and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapo- “Solar System: It Is Modeled in Miniature lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); by Saturn, Its Rings and Nine Moons,” Ron Miller, “The Archaeology of Space Life, May 29, 1944, 78. Art,” Leonardo (1996): 139. Saturn as Seen from Titan by Chesley Bonestell.

78 surface, we have an opportunity to look back. “On moon photo. When rendered in color, the view of the Moon’s surface the tiny figures of the rocket’s Earth from the Moon was stunning and sublime, occupants view their earth, shining brilliantly in the not scary. The transcript from Apollo 8 captures the lunar night.”7 Bonestell was not the first to imagine moment when astronaut Bill Anders became the first or depict what Earth might look like from the Moon, human to see Earth rise over the lunar surface: “Oh but in this brief caption the power of seeing Earth my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the from the Moon is provocatively articulated—trav- Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty!” He snaps a elers see “their earth” and experience a sense of quick, unscheduled shot with the black-and-white human-planetary connection that, for the Western film loaded in his camera and then asks Jim Lovell to imagination, is more easily felt at a distance. hand him a roll of color. From the transcript we feel the excitement of the astronauts fighting over the camera to snap the iconic picture. As foreshadowed by the Bonestell image caption of “their earth,” Earthrise is a study of rela- tions, humankind’s relationship to the planet and the planet’s relationship to the Moon. To think of Earth in relation is to dispel the fear Heidegger saw in the uprooting of humans and to instead understand the journey to the Moon as reconnecting with Earth. We see the Moon, Earth, and the humans both on Earth and behind the camera as part of a system, both gravi- tationally and cosmologically.9 Earth is not an isolated world but a planet connected to a broader solar Earthrise. system. Earth’s planetary nature, made legible when looking back from the Moon, draws our thinking to Seeing Earth from the Moon was not a posi- the other planets that Earth might be in relation to. tive experience for all mid-century thinkers. One of the first circulated photographs of Earth taken with the lunar surface prominently in the foreground was Exomoon a black-and-white image from the Lunar Orbiter I mission of 1966 (two years before Earthrise, 20 years This trope of seeing a planet from its moon links after Bonestell’s illustration). A month after this pho- the pre–Space Age imagination of human space tograph appeared, Martin Heidegger sat down for flight to the peak of Project Apollo and extends into the famous Der Spiegel interview addressing his com- the 21st century and the rise of exoplanet astronomy plicity with Nazism in Hitler’s Germany. Heidegger (exoplanets are planets in orbit around other stars). made passing reference to this photograph when In an alien solar system, a purple volcano spews explaining his concern over the increasingly technical orange lava from its craggy peak. Like a mountain character of Western culture: “Technology tears peo- stream, the lava braids down the ashen sides of the ple away and uproots them from the earth more and volcano and joins an ocean of melting rock. In the more. I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly foreground, islands of solidified debris float in the scared when I recently saw the photographs of the molten sea. Surfaces glimmer, reflecting the light earth taken from the moon.” Heidegger articulates of a distant star. This molten vista of an imagined the stakes of this uprootedness: “Everything essential exomoon, dynamic and threatening, serves as a and great has only emerged when human beings had frame for the focus of the painting: an exoplanet. A a home and were rooted in a tradition.”8 gas giant, half in shadow just like Bonestell’s Saturn, This regressive philosophical interpretation rises above the melting moon’s surface. The atmo- of the journey to the Moon in the lead-up to the sphere of the planet is filled with swirls of orange Apollo program is at odds with the legacy of the and white clouds and, reminiscent again of Saturn,

6 7 9 Wyn Wachhorst, “The Dream of Space- “Trip to the Moon: Artist Paints Journey See Valerie Olson, Into the Extreme: US flight: Nostalgia for a Bygone Future,” by Rocket,” Life, March 4, 1946, 74. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Massachusetts Review 36, no. 1 (1995): 13. Earth (Minneapolis: University of Minne- 8 sota Press, 2018). Martin Heidigger, Interview, Der Spiegel, Nr. 23 (1976), 193-219. 47 Ursae Majoris by Lynette Cook.

80 Lisa Messeri 80 the planet is adorned with a system of rings, at a and its star, but she much prefers it when she has the Pluto following its demotion from planet to dwarf relations. The animations of Elizabeth LaPensée, slight angle from the moon’s horizon. A second and liberty to include a moon. planet. This upbeat song of solace is presented from an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish scholar and artist, third planet, mere dots in the night sky, create a Especially in those early days, scientists the viewpoint of Charon, a celestial body that used depict the complex entanglements between people, trail between this mammoth planet and its host star. sought artistic representations that did not stray to be classified as Pluto’s moon but whose status other living things, Earth, sky, and Moon. She illus- This is a painting of the planetary system far from the known data. Cook leveraged this also changed after Pluto’s demotion. Suddenly on trates travel between Earth and Moon via canoes 47 Ursae Majoris by Lynette Cook. In 2001, when logic, agreeing to be faithful in her depiction of the equal footing with Pluto, Charon comforts Pluto by and intimacies between moon women and earth this detection was made, exoplanet hunting was a exoplanet but offering moons as a compromise— reframing their relationship: men.12 relatively new endeavor, the first exoplanets con- since a moon is completely fictional (the data Thinking about moons and their planets firmed just six years earlier. Today, scientists know simply aren’t good enough to identify a companion I’m your moon as part of a continuous geography reminds us that of over 4,000 exoplanets. Back in 2001, there were to an exoplanet), she could be more imaginative. You’re my moon the cosmos is neither universal nor empty. From around 70. The first detected exoplanets were all gas This was also helpful for Cook in conveying to the We go round and round the Moon’s surface, we see a cosmos structured by giants like Jupiter and Saturn. The yellow dwarf star viewer what kind of world the exoplanet might be. From out here, it’s the rest of the world that relations made meaningful by different people in 47 Ursae Majoris was host to the first multiplanet Since they were mostly gas giants, Cook could use looks so small different ways. These relations pattern what geogra- system in which both exoplanets had near-circular the moon to indicate attributes it and the exoplanet Promise me phies get imagined as places and destinations. As we orbits and were located at distances from their star shared, like temperature, by including ice or pools You will always remember who you are. step back onto Earth’s surface, how do we hold on to on scale with our solar system. The 2001 discov- of lava. Cook explained how including an imagined the various connections, commitments, values, and ery strengthened the possibility that there existed moonscape “tells the viewer what could be there.” Thinking about a moon and its relationship to a practices that enliven and complicate our under- elsewhere a planetary system like our own. Might we When Cook paints moonscapes, she draws planet, reimagining as I do a closeness or kinship, standing of Terra and her kin? then also find another Earth? The hope that such a on familiar geological formations: snow-capped is to presuppose an emptiness, distance, or outside- planet exists is evident in Cook’s painting. Lingering mountains, volcanoes, buttes, clouds, and craters. ness between them—the “extra” of extraterrestrial. close to the star, hardly visible to the viewer, is an With these forms, her paintings make imaginary This is a specifically Western cosmology, and I’d illuminated speck representing where a rocky, Earth- moons relatable. While many of Cook’s colleagues like to end by gesturing to other cosmologies where like planet is fantasized to be. in astronomical art agree that this landscape lunar-planetary relations are already embedded The purpose of this painting, for the sci- tradition pays homage to both Bonestell and to in human geographies. Folklorist Jane Young has entists who commissioned it, is to showcase the Romantic paintings, Cook personally does not described the Native American understanding of exoplanet, not the moon whose existence is specu- identify with any such tradition other than scientific space and the Moon in order to critique the frontier lative. The moon is there to offer context for what illustration. She did, however, allow the comparison mentality. For Zuni and other Native American would otherwise be an indistinct gaseous planet. to American landscapes insofar as “space artists communities, space is not “outer” but rather “inner.” By placing the exoplanet in relation to a fictive are showing worlds that the rest of society cannot Instead of the view of the universe as comprising exomoon, the host planet can be understood from a see, that we cannot travel to.” Her depictions bring inanimate objects in mathematical motion, many new perspective. exoplanets into the common vernacular: “It makes Native American cosmologies teach of intimate rela- I met Cook at her home in the Bay Area in the distant worlds in our universe seem more real tions between people, stars, and the Moon. Kinship 2010. We sat in her living room, where her walls were and close and more a part of our lives.” A familiar abounds throughout the universe. It is a way of adorned with her art. There were several paintings landscape that frames an alien exoplanet offers an knowing, Young demonstrates, that facilitates travel of exoplanets, often, like the one described above, entry point from which to comprehend an invisible to the Moon by means other than a rocket ship. She with a rocky landscape of a moon in the foreground and distant world. tells of one anthropologist who, when working with and a gas giant suspended in the sky. Cook was the Inuit in Alaska, recorded the following response one of the first artists to paint exoplanets. She was to being told about astronauts walking on the Moon: approached in 1995 by Frank Drake, famous for his Lunar-Planetary Kinship “We didn’t know this was the first time you white equation predicting the number of planets in the people had been to the Moon. Our shamans have Milky Way existing at present that have communi- Putting planets in relation to moons humanizes been going for years. They go all the time.”10 cative life; he asked her to depict 51 Pegasi b, the these extraterrestrial geographies. Not only does it More recently, scholars writing about and first exoplanet known to orbit a Sun-like star. From evoke the experience any one of us might have had producing indigenous futurisms11 illustrate how there, Cook collaborated with the first American of looking up at a crescent celestial body, but it also indigenous cosmologies and scientific knowledge planet-hunting team, producing artist interpretations envisions a planet in a pack, giving it a companion or are not relegated to the past but inform our present for press releases and other public-outreach needs. even a whole kin network. Even as I have described and future thinking about earthly and multiplanetary She described for me the process of painting an exo- a series of images in which moons are pictorially planet. She begins by meeting with the astronomer, in the foreground, the cultural meaning remains who tells her the type of star the exoplanet orbits, attached to the planet floating in the distance. Earth, 10 11 12 the distance between the planet and star, and the Saturn, and exoplanets become part of a connected M. Jane Young, “‘Pity the Indians of Grace L. Dillon, ed., Walking the Clouds: See “Along the River of Spacetime,” “The mass of the planet. From there it’s an iterative pro- cosmos in which moons enrich our imaginations of Outer Space’: Native American Views of An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction Path without End,” and “Returning,” cess, a negotiation between her artistic license and these cosmic places. Returning to the edge of our the Space Program,” Western Folklore 46 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, http://www.elizabethlapensee.com/#/an- the scientist’s devotion to fidelity. Sometimes the (1987): 272. 2012); William Lempert, “Decolonizing imations. Thanks to Zoe Todd for telling solar system, we see another example of the support- Encounters of the Third Kind: Alterna- me about this work. astronomer instructs Cook to depict just the planet ing role imaginatively granted to moons in a song tive Futuring in Native Science Fiction written by folk satirist Jonathan Coulton to comfort Film,” Visual Anthropology Review 30, no. 2 (2014): 164.

82 The Moon’s Earth Lisa Messeri 83