Just Out of This World
Image credit: NASA.
In recognition of today’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing please enjoy these Ambi articles on Outer Space and NASA.
- Ethnographer Janet Vertesi captures the choreography of NASA scientists. From the newest issue of AMBIDEXTROUS, she recounts how NASA scientists get down and do the Rover Dance. Robots in Space…and the Scientists that Mimic Them.
“Sharing common ground on Mars and a common body language on Earth helps team members to manage their differences and agree what the rover should do every day.”
- Social psychologist Susannah Paletz shares her perspective from helping NASA design work environments with another article from newest issue of AMBIDEXTROUS, “Space,”Organizational Pressures within NASA Run High. She writes of normalization of variance and ignoring dissent.
“NASA management focused so much on schedule that they did not listen to the engineers and their safety concerns. In trying to see the forest, management missed the trees.”
- In Issue 6 “The Future” co-editor-in-chief Bjoern Hartmann gathers Don Davis’ 1970s fantastic drawings of futuristic imagined space colonies in Let’s Build Suburbs in Space
“In the 1970s, just a few years after the first moon landing, space colonies were eagerly anticipated as the wave of the future. As NASA’s space settlement archive still boasts: ‘We have the ability to live in space, therefore we will.’ Artist Don Davis produced a series of concept images of human space habitats for the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, during those early enthusiast years. His renderings show bucolic scenes of (artificial) nature inside gigantic, mile-long spacecrafts rotating in orbit.”