the last getaway specials: the space shuttle and the artist

Leonardo

The Last Getaway Specials: The Space Shuttle and the ArtistAuthor(s): Joe DavisSource: Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1991), pp. 467-469Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575525 .

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SPACE ART

The Last Getaway Specials: The

Space Shuttle and the Artist

Joe Davis

en the first cave painter stood before The space age rock walls with a primitive palette of bone and ocher and mandate to pu animal fat, there may have been a nasty argument going on. and technical ex Perhaps some of the artist's companions liked the rockjust since the Nixon as it was, a complete original. Maybe the community shaman duce 'tangible ben decided that artists should not compete with the Great space was strictlT Spirits in the business of decorating rocks. Proto-en- place for serious vironmentalists may have taken exception to unpleasant could be justifie, odors or brooded in anticipation of accumulating graffiti. NASA has not be Now, artists with fantastically more complex palettes are inclined to reco looking at patches of blue sky, and beyond, and there are from the standp still very similar debates about the role of art and of the artist cal benefits, with in the physical environment. of graphic arts

'Artists' concepts' heralded the first adventures in space, ment various pr just as there were artists' concepts for great cathedrals and print and broadca the Panama Canal. Artists are very often crucial translators cally, the Graphic of technical achievement for society at large. In the 1950s Office at NASA a and 1960s artists' visionary images fused the emotions and a kind of artist-r imaginations of millions of people, helping to galvanize the in the early days dedicated labor and democratic consensus that culminated Special program. in our first expeditions to the moon. In the 1980s, the term office within NA,S 'space art' continrued to be used to describe entirely ter- cifically mandate restrial collections of painting and sculpture about space. ideas for space-la These artworks had a memorable, albeit indirect, role in normally referre, getting objects into space. But these works were not art in were officially in] space. thing other than

In 1977 an optimistic National Aeronautics and Space the wrong office Administration (NASA) made available at their lowest prices NASA with a dirn ever certain small space shuttle payloads called Getaway no place else tc Specials (Fig. 1). For a $10,000 fee to scientific, commercial inherent utility c and individual users, NASA would fly self-contained, 5-cubic- exploration of s] ft cylinders, each weighing up to 200 lb, and return the net submerged in a t contents to the customers at the end of the mission. Artists in turn

Getaway Specials were to the mutual benefit of NASA and tions. NASA said its customers. These payloads would be small enough to take practical benefits up the spaces left over after larger, 'primary' payloads were to describe the p installed in the space shuttle cargo bay, thus making more to the govemme efficient use of the space available on each particular shuttle within the artistic mission and allowing for modest research in the space tic license' and '

environment that might benefit NASA directly and that mitment to prac NASA might not be specifically funded to carry out itself. even though art On the other hand, Getaway Specials opened up previously history of teclin unavailable benefits of space launch services to schools, telecommunicati small companies and even individuals who could afford the graphic emulsiol $10,000 fee. At the very least, the Getaway Specials were about what artisl in keeping with the spirit of American enterprise and from confusion o were good public relations for an agency dependent on public approval. Although the Getaway Special program Joe Davis (researcher, arl

Advanced Visual Studies, was ostensibly open to anyone, the idea of artists having a direct role in the exploration of space was still very slow Received25January 198 to materialize. Manuscript solicited by C to materialize.

? 1991 ISAST Pergamon Press pic. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/91 $3.00+0.00

rncy has a legal rsue scientific ploration and, years, to pro-

efits'. To NASA, y business: the s research that d in Congress. ,en historically gnize the arts oint of practi- ABSTRACT

the exception used to docu- The author discusses proce- rojects for the dural problems over topics such as r

i. Ir oi 'practical benefit' and 'scientific st media. Iro- value' that were encountered by :s Coordinator both scientists and artists in seek- ctuallybecame ing to include works of art on the ejection office space shuttle flight manifest. of the Getaway It was the only

A that was spe- Ad to deal with artists. So when artists with unched art contacted the agency, they were d to the Graphics Coordinator, where they formed that if they were interested in any- igraphic arts, then certainly they were in e. Since there was no other office inside ective to deal with artists, there was simply > go. Unfortunately, it seemed as if the >f the arts, and the whole idea of cultural pace, might have to remain permanently tradition of very narrow applications. were having trouble with their own tradi-

I that space shuttle payloads should have s. But the idea that artists should be obliged ractical value of their artworks-especially nt-has historically caused much suffering : community. In a world familiar with 'artis- art for art's sake', any formal artistic com- tical benefits is often regarded as heresy, ists have contributed considerably to the ical achievements. (The development of ons, steamships, submarines and photo- ns represents a few examples). Confusion ts should do may at least partially derive )ver what it is artists think they are supposed

tist), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for 40 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.

i.

)tto Piene.

LEONARDO, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 467-469, 1991 467



to do. Works of art that must be con- trasted with works of practical value, and

preoccupations with secular arguments focusing on technicalities of nomencla- ture ('Is it a breath mint or is it a candy mint?'), characterize an art that does not seem to accept the idea that 'value' itself is an absolute that can be at one and the same time artistic and empiri- cal, intuitive and scientific. Perhaps art can be a kind of quantum mechanical one-thing that does not necessarily undergo improvement by division. Or

perhaps the arts must be strictly iso- lated from the idiosyncracies of other

disciplines. NASA, now a party to this debate, is also predisposed to confusion about value and humanity, which has in turn characterized the history of science. Artists generally have declined to represent the practical benefits of

their artworks, and NASA has refused to accept the practical value of anything other than scientific research and development.

In the purest sense, scientific research is carried out exclusively by scientists who specialize in a particular field, for

sponsored research projects in that same field and under the rigorous review of that sponsorship. Research that devi- ates from normal patterns of oversight and peer review is routinely ostracized from the literature and denied sponsorship. So by both calling for scientific research and making Getaway Specials available to nonscientists, NASA found itself in the precarious midst of a self-

imposed contradiction. From a legal standpoint, if anyone (including nonscientists) who could meet 'technical' criteria for Getaway Special payloads

Fig. 1. NASA 'Getaway Special' space shuttle payload container with optional opening-lid assembly. The 5-cubic-ft cylinder is able to hold up to 200 lb of cargo. (Photo: Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA)

was entitled to pay the fee and secure

payload space, then there was no basis for excluding qualified artists from the

program. Furthermore, because NASA lacked

the necessary facilities and payroll, the

agency had determined not to evaluate the scientific viability of its commercial payloads. Payloads were reserved and manifested on the basis of nothing more than the 'good intentions' of the cus- tomer. Clearly, NASA could not reject a payload otherwise qualified, simply because it pertained to or contained a work of art; but problems between artists and NASA were not entirely limited to the issue of practical benefits.

While artists were having a hard time

contending with technical requirements, they also miscalculated about the direc- tion of the money flow. Artists tended to see NASA as a patron or sponsor who would 'pay' them to put art in space. NASA, meanwhile, rejected payloads that it felt would take unfair advantage of

public resources by utilizing the space shuttle program to produce nontechni- cal 'financial killings' on the open market.

Proposals were rejected for payloads that included prints, stamps, medallions or anything else considered unethical

entrepreneurial activity at the expense of the federal government, in spite of the fact that the space agency was ac-

tively encouraging the broadest possible commercialization of space. NASA decided not to approve any Getaway Special that would produce anything with com- memorative or aesthetic value (works of art) intended for later sale. Ultimately, this constraint evolved into the stipula- tions that if an artist produced a payload that (1) simultaneously satisfied his or her own aesthetic criteria and the technical requirements for Getaway Specials, (2) where the technical com-

ponent of such a payload could not be

separated from the aesthetic component and (3) where the aesthetic component could not later be sold or marketed as such, then NASA would fly the payload.

The technical requirements were difficult for artists to meet, but, albeit

challenging, they were steeped in the

long tradition of such artists as Samuel F.B. Morse, Robert Fulton and Louis Daguerre (all of whom significantly contributed to the history of technical achievement). In contrast, the nonprofit economic requirement was devastating to artists. The $10,000 'ticket' price was

actually only a fraction of the total costs of any prospective payload. Payload struc- tures, owing to safety regulations, would have to be made with special materials

468 Davis, The Last Getaway Specials



that could withstand the rigors of launch and the space environment. Com-

ponents such as batteries and electron- ics would have to be approved and pre- tested (by NASA). Consequently, the actual cost of a Getaway Special could turn out to be quite high. It would be a rare arts administrator indeed who did not look somewhat askance at a proposal to buy, say, $11,400 worth of Japanese electronic components-or worse, at a suggestion that to prepare for a payload, an arts organization should pay for basic research at government, industrial or

university scientific laboratories. Likewise, the National Science Foun-

dation is not inclined to sponsor artists in the production of works of art that

represent technical benefit. Needless to say, the communities of artists and scientists jealously guard their respec- tive endowments and are extremely con- scious of would-be intrusions into their hallowed territory.

In May 1982, NASA signed its first Standard Launch Services Agreement (analogous to a common carrier con- tract) with me for a Getaway Special that will contain a work of art called

Ruby Falls, a collaborative project de-

signed to produce artificial auroras in the atmosphere with pulses of electrons from a Getaway Special payload. Since that time several other applications have been accepted for Getaway Special arts payloads, including those of Al Wunder- lich of the Rhode Island School of De- sign (a project called Lightflight, with which I am also involved) and Joseph

McShane, an Arizona artist whose Geta-

way Special payload flew in October 1984.

Lowry Burgess, an artist at Carnegie- Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn-

sylvania, whose payload proposals were

rejected by the Getaway Special program over the issue of practical benefits, decided to approach the problem from a different perspective. Since a 90% subsidy of the costs of Getaway Special payloads provided NASA with the rationale for a policy requiring practical benefits, Burgess suggested that artists be allowed to fly nonsubsidized

payloads at full cost, thus obviating the need for so-called practical benefits. Bur- gess eventually prevailed with this approach, and NASA instituted a genre of payloads called 'nonscientific'. Unfor- tunately, the full price of a standard 5-cubic-ft/200 lb (Getaway Special-type) payload jumped from a base price of $10,000 to a base price of over $300,000, thus effectively prohibiting the partici- pation of most artists altogether. Non- scientific payloads, incidentally, must also conform to nonprofit status, i.e. they cannot be sold.

The Nonscientific Payload Office now provides NASA with an even more ef- fective buffer to deal with artists than was achieved by the office of the Graphics Coordinator. Artists referred to the Non- scientific Payload Office are not offered the option of representing practical benefits for lower-priced Getaway Special- type projects. And, unlike the Getaway Special payloads that could be reserved

with optical windows and opening doors to expose a payload directly to the space environment, the nonscientific payloads have to be totally sealed packages with no ports or windows and no mechanical or electrical connections to the shuttle.

Only Burgess reached an agreement with NASA for a nonscientific payload before the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

After the Challenger accident, NASA significantly restructured its strategy for the commercialization of space to the extent that new reservations for small payloads from the private and commercial sectors are no longer being accepted. Only payloads that were ma- triculated before the Challenger accident (such as Ruby Falls and Lightflight) will be flown in the foreseeable future, and then at much lower priority in the flight queue than they would have previously enjoyed.

Perhaps the most serious implication that the Challenger accident has had for artists working on space shuttle payloads is that payloads originally intended to be the first of many, may now be the last in this century, which only increases their importance. Although NASA has resumed flying the remain- ing, previously reserved private and commercial payloads, it may be quite some time before Getaway Specials, or payloads like them, are offered again to the public imagination. And of course, they will almost certainly be much more expensive.

Davis, The Last Getaway Specials 469



the last getaway specials: the space shuttle and the artist

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