Space Elevator Journal

The Right Way to Get to Space

Music for the Space Elevator Ride

The space elevator entered the collective consciousness over 110 years ago through the mind of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and remained largely hidden behind the Iron Curtain until it entered pop culture in Sir Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise in 1979.

A portal to a new dimension of the shared mind opened up in mid-2006 with the release of Inquisitor Betrayer's CD Space Elevator four years after an electronics engineer with a synthesizer fixation (and closet alien) named Dale Kay, and multi-instrumentalist/keyboardist Wes Antczak started putting out symphonic electronica on their particular wavelength.

Along the way, the duo was augmented by a maiden named Lorraine who liked Dale's last name so much she took it as her own when they married.

Speaking to the Space Elevator Journal in their collective e-mail voice the band explains what attracted them to the space elevator as an album concept.

Dale and Wes are in harmony on the concept's genesis in the excitement of watching sci-fi influences from Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem and "favorite TV shows such as Star Trek, Space 1999, and later Babylon 5, and movies such as (of course) the Star Wars saga" become reality.

"Man's journey into space is at hand," adds Wes. "It's real, it's complex, it's frightening, It's also the greatest ride we can ever imagine. It's all of these things rolled up into one fantastic and unbelievably intense experience."

"The music goes beyond anything earthly and current – to connect with something so into the future," Lorraine explains. "I wasn’t actually in on selecting the concept. It was something decided before I joined the band. Both Dale and Wes are heavily into sci-fi [and] I too am a big sci-fi fan going back as far as the old Buck Rogers serials, Jules Verne books and the 'Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity' series of books (and no, I am not that old)."

Once the SE is built and the world is "busy with a mission other than self-destruction" Dale opines SE passengers (and listeners) will be able to "relax, sit back, enjoy the music. The ride is all about you now."

Offered a free ticket to space on the SE Wes would simply "go for a quick spin around the solar system and then probably come back home and get back to making more music."

Lorraine "would probably just give my free ride to someone else [because] I don’t even like to fly in an airplane" [but thinks] "it would work for Dale [because he] is an alien you know ... and lately I’ve been beginning to wonder about Wes. How else could [Dale] come up with all the stuff he puts in our music?"

"I would like to take a look around with my camera in hand," agrees Dale the newly-outed alien. "Maybe park up next to one of the new telescopes that would be in place by the time I could go for a ride. Hook my camera up and just take some pictures [and then]- home ... it's been a while since I been there."


Listen to samples here at Inquisitor Betrayer's web site or just Buy the Disc

--SEJ--

Labels: Space Culture, Space elevator, Space Media

Postcards from the Future

Clip from trailer for Postcards from the Future
Source: Mahalo Bay Films

US President George W. Bush is not the only one with visions of The Moon, Mars and Beyond. It's also the tagline of Alan Chan's upcoming 'future documentary', Postcards from the Future set in (and inspired by) the near-future Vision for Space Exploration era chronicling of the life of Sean Everman while he works on the new moonbase as a civilian electrical engineer building out the base's power grid, his days captured in a series of video postcards and personal messages he occasionally sends to his wife on Earth.

Director Alan Chan
Courtesy: Mahalo Bay Films

Chan adds directing Postcards to his earlier movie credits that include a stellar list of mainstream films (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Titanic and Polar Express) as well as the short about the space elevator discussed in an earlier Space Elevator Journal post (see: Proud Papa Portrays Progeny).

There's a short trailer available here (requires Quicktime) and synopsis (in PDF format) on the movie's site. The curiosity of film geeks may be whetted by the shot anatomy explaining the all-digital process.

Labels: Space Culture, Space elevator, Space Media

The Astronaut Farmer - Private Space Flight Goes Hollywood

You have to know somebody who would start a space elevator blog is not-exactly pro-rocketry. Besides the tons of pollutants thrown with every launch and the space debris blanketing the earth from decades of throw-away booster stages, dead satellites etc., rockets just strike me as horribly inefficient and needlessly expensive. Not that the space elevator will be cheap to build but, once built, the cost of getting to space decreases with each lift.

All that aside for the moment, what caught my eye is not the fact that someone wrote the story but that it got financed. Hollywood thinks there's a market for space-related movies.

The Astronaut Farmer is about a NASA astronaut (played by Billy Bob Thornton) who is forced to retire to save his family farm. Unable to give up his dream of space travel, he builds his own rocket despite the government's threats to stop him. (View Trailer)

This seems like another All-American-boy-with-a-dream movie and space travel just happens to be far out enough to make the protagonist seem crazy but realistic enough to actually happen while being something the movie-going public can grasp. So the Hollywood money is mostly behind the moral carried in the tagline: If we don't have our dreams, we have nothing. Still, I'm glad to see private space travel is somewhere in our collective psyche.

Labels: Private space travel, Space Culture

Postcards To Space

Postcards To Space is developing the world's first space sculpture called STREET, a 325ft. diameter ring made of Kapton, a space-rated plastic film. In flight the craft will digitally display postcards printed on it during construction against the backdrop of Low Earth Orbit.

The design, building and flying of these inflatable space sculptures are funded by postcard sales.

According to their site "Postcards To Space exists to develop space-media opportunities for individuals, promote scientific knowledge and create public art in the new frontier."

Somebody had to be first. Purchase postcard kits here.

--PB--

Labels: Space commerce, space commercialisation, Space Culture