I have touched on this before, but this still blows my mind. The US space program has taken to the moon a series of cars (Apollo 15, 16, and 17), a golf club and a couple of balls (Apollo 14), and some Playboy centerfolds tucked into some checklists the astronauts carried on their suits (Apollo 12).

These astronauts will sure show Dean Wormer what happens when you mess with the boys of Delta Tau Apollo!

Anyway, NASA, I’m holding you responsible for removing my smug sense of superiority towards lame dude-stereotype-based commercials. Now I’ll have to think, “Well, when we went to the moon in the grandest human tradition of bold exploration and boundless curiosity, and it cost like eight bazillion dollars an ounce to bring anything with us, what did we do with this opportunity? We brought cars, some golf equipment, and a few Playboy centerfolds. Fuck it, toss me a Tequiza.”

Some images from Albert Schwichtenberg’s 1962 paper “Space Medicine and Astronaut Selection”.

Off Isla Socorro. From NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

One of Bern Porter’s Founds on display at Ubu in collaboration with the MOMA exhibition Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Bern Porter (1911–2004) contributed to some of the most important scientific and artistic innovations of the twentieth century. He worked on the development of the cathode-ray tube (for television), the atomic bomb (with the Manhattan Project), and NASA’s Saturn V Rocket. When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in 1945, Porter walked away from his position with the Manhattan Project and, disappointed with his work as a physicist, turned his attention to artistic pursuits. In the aftermath of World War II, a flood of visual information spread across the United States. Advertisements in newspapers and magazines and on billboards and television promised an easier and happier life through the purchasing of products. For his collages, which he dubbed “Founds,” Porter gathered the waste of this new culture—advertisements, junk mail, instruction booklets, scientific documents, and other material—and turned it into art. In addition to his books of Founds, Porter authored treatises on the unification of science and art (what he called “Sciart”) and books of experimental poetry. He published work by major figures in art and literature, such as Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and Dick Higgins. Also, as the self-proclaimed inventor of mail art, Porter was an active participant in a vast international network of artists who shared their work with each other through the post.

The first television picture of Earth from space. This NASA image was taken on April 1, 1960 by TIROS 1.

Might as well go with NASA.

This was among the last good finds I came across at the Providence In Your Ear, before it closed years ago. Sitting in a clearance bin were three double-disc sets of Hermann Nitsch’s massive harmonium drone.

Of the recordings, Nitsch said:

In 1968, I got a harmonium as a wedding present from my wife. From then on, I sat at the harmonium and played almost exclusively long notes that never wanted to end. I tried to listen into the infinite structure of the stars, into the unimaginable spaces searching for sound. The joy of beautiful colors, of (almost intoxicating) combinations of sound was most important but at the same time it was carried by the almost presumptuous task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space. The course of the stars were to be put to sound.

One more from the NASA Ames 1970’s Space Settlement art archive.

You can read more about the settlement project here.

A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.

“Let’s whip by that moon of Saturn and film it close-up; how hard could that be?”

Watch the video.

Training and preparation for mission STS-125.