on break

Its been a little quiet lately. Photos I shot at the end of last year are still waiting to be scanned (the lab at school is closed a further 2 weeks) and I'll be working on 2 grants and a job application in the coming weeks. But to keep the blog going, I'll post a little about the new branch of my project that's been on my mind lately.

I've been photographing observatories for the past year in between shooting the views for "The Expected Frontier". While shooting these magnificent pieces of star-gazing architecture I wondered, "is there anything more I could be doing for this part of the project?" And of course, the answer was "yes there is." I've recently become obsessed with the early years of space exploration, the Apollo program and everything after that has been progressing towards the event of exploring new land. If there's ever a mission to Mars in the next 60 years, I want to be the next Timothy O'Sullivan or W.H. Jackson that gets to go and photograph with an 8x10. Most of the work I've made so far I hope, helps make the case for me to go. But in the meantime, I might need something else to keep me occupied. This next part of the project will do that easily.

When I heard that they (I guess the government and NASA together) decided to discontinue the shuttle program, I was a little upset. People had been going into space using the shuttle since I was born and I had watched launches and had been playing with toy shuttles since I could remember. It didn't make sense to me. It was like they were deciding to stop progress. The shuttle program is old and the shuttles themselves have been used way past the time they were supposed to retire. However, there was never any practical idea that surfaced to replace them. I guess they're working on that now but in the meantime, the U.S. has to catch a ride with the Russians on their rockets.

So, that leaves me wondering "well what are we (the U.S.) going to do while we wait for NASA to build the next space shuttles?" Are we still going to make progress in exploring space or are we going to fall back? The next part of my photographic project will look at this question and document the things related to how we are going to get there. This probably won't come out as literal as I'm proposing but I hope it will be more of an exploration of the idea of space as "frontier" and how this idea really is entrenched into the U.S.. Or, maybe not the whole U.S. but me, at least.

That's where I'll leave it for now. I have places to go in mind like Edwards AFB in California and I'd like to get to see one of the last space shuttles launch- the last one will happen sometime in the later half of 2011. But what I'd really like to find is that toy space shuttle that I had when I was kid and got so much use out of that I had to buy another one myself, with my own money.

From the bottom of the 13th page of google results for "toy shuttles"