On January 8th, 2024, the United States launched a commercial mission to the moon. In that mission, Astrobotic was aiming to be the first company to land on the lunar surface. Among the payloads aboard the Astrobotic Peregrine was a Carnegie Mellon University-designed, collaborative sculpture project called the Moon Arc, that is as much a work of art as it is an engineering marvel. So what is the Moon Arc and why does it matter? Welcome to T-Minus Deep Space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmausis. My guest today is Mark Baskinger, the director of the Joseph Belay Center for Design Fusion, Product Track Chair, and a professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Mark was one of the leads in the Moon Arc project, and while the sculpture didn't make it to the moon on this attempt, as the saying goes, it's really about the journey more than the destination. We wanted to learn more about this remarkable project from those that designed it. My name is Mark Baskinger. I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I chair our undergraduate program in industrial design within the School of Design, and I'm also the director of the Joseph Belay Center for Design Fusion, which is an agile outreach arm-granging design training across campus and outward organizations. And then I think the third leg of what I do is director of the Carnegie Mellon Moon Arc project, which is what we're going to talk about today. Yes, and thank you so much for joining me. Let's talk about the moon arc. This is so fascinating. Please tell me about this. Sure. The moon arc project began around 2008 under the leadership of former dean and faculty member Lowry Burgess, who is a well-accounted space artist. CMU at the time was transforming robotics efforts from vehicles, Earthly vehicles to outer space vehicles, landers, and so forth, and had spun off a company called Astrobotic. In the process of standing up that company, they were competing for the Google Lunar XPRIV, and there were hundreds of teams, I believe, at the time that entered that competition. And that was largely aimed at getting a vehicle on the moon with imaging capabilities to document about 500 meters of the moon, and the first team to send back images, high-route images, could win the competition and tens of millions of dollars. I think what most people learned off the bat is that the prize money was only a portion of the expenses of what it would take to get to the moon. So in Astrobotic standing up as a payload delivery service and vehicle fabricator, CMU took the posture of saying, "This can't just be a robotics and scientific effort. We need to think about culture and the humanities, and how do we bring campus for the first time to the moon through this company, and what statement are we making about the integration of the arts and the humanities along with the sciences and technologies?" So Lowry and some faculty members at the time, some students originated this idea that eventually became the Moon Arc. It was a reliquary human experience, and it was very primitive back in those days, a variety of metal disks that would have been engraved with some information and sent to the moon for posterity for someone in the distant future to discover and read. What we learned early on is that you get one shot at the moon, so you might as well make it as grand as you can. Our design team really pushed the limits of fabrication technology and materiality and what spacefaring apparatus might actually be. So we just took it to the perimeters of what was acceptable, and then we moved beyond that. And so in the years since, the space industry has changed. The rule set has accommodated a greater variety of artifacts that can go into space. But early on, we had the initiative to do no harm that anything that we would put on the moon would leave the smallest material trace possible, have the least ecological or environmental implications to get there. So hyperlite taking less fuel, culturally rich, and ecologically sound. So there's spacefaring parameters, and then there's these other issues that we seek on top to have that narrative, that complex narrative really be the focus of the project. And gosh, when I think of similar things like the pioneer plaques or the Voyager golden discs and things like that, it is an incredible set of decisions that have to be made, very purposeful decisions of what to include, what not to include the design. The moon arc is beautiful. It is a beautiful object. Can you tell me about the actual design of it? Because it is just gorgeous. It's gorgeous. Sure. Much of the design came from two competing agendas, one being hyperlite. And we were afforded initially three ounces of payload space. We netted out around 10. And we had to negotiate up in weight over time because three ounces really doesn't get you much. But to send 10 ounces to space, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel costs and logistics. And that's not fabrication costs at all. We really took that to heart. It has to be very light. So taking a skeletonized approach in the open frame chamber, an exoskeleton of sorts that would protect the more fragile contents within. So really, the competing agenda for hyperliteness is cultural weight and how much can we do when we put in. And not just by volume, but impactful, meaningful stuff that someone in the future would want to uncover and want to make sense of. And what stories might we tell? We use the analogy of poetry. We could write in encyclopedia, but no one wants it in encyclopedia. A poem leaves enough imaginative space for what's not there. And it gives space for someone to fill in as they read and interpret it. So for us, "Moonark" was a poem. And so deciding what would go in, what might stay out, what might be used for a future mission that speaks to that artifact and so forth really drove the design. But in general, we used platonic solids. We based a lot of the shape grammar around the pentagon. Five-sidedness was really important to us for two respects. One, we have five fingers on our hands, and this is very much a set of handmade objects. And talking about our creative capacity as humans, the hands are really where the brain interacts with the world. And so a lot of the work that went into "Moonark" was creative practice, whether it was writing or sculpture, visuals, and so forth, handmade. And so that was important. And that really was a secondary narrative for us. The primary one, we looked at what is Earth? And this is a message coming from Earth to the moon. And in looking at platonic solids, we landed on the icosahedron. And the icosahedron is a very plankton-like shape. And we looked at plankton as the largest biomass on the planet, and which really gave rise to the rest of life without plankton filtering air, creating oxygen, cleaning the ocean. The planet would be in a different place. So there's a symbiotic relationship that we have to plankton, a very, very large biomass, which outnumbers and outweighs humanity. But our relationship to plankton and what it does for us all hinges on the relationship of Earth to Moon. So the Moon moving the tides and the oceanic relationships, really, that's the symbiosis that is the underpinning of why Moon arc exists and why the shape grammar is there. So the icosahedron, when you cut it in a particular way, becomes a pentagon. And so now we've got this inside/outside shape language to components on the inside that reference plankton, the exoskeletal shapes that reference the pentagon and so forth. And so we're hoping that someone in the distant future can put these shapes together and say, hey, you know, this kind of looks like this. I wonder if those folks play back when we're talking about this relationship. And then if they unpack the Moon arc, they'll see more concrete narratives that you stitch us to that and talk about the greater situation of humanity on our planet. Yeah. Okay. Can you tell me about what's in Moon arc? I mean, I love the phrase that you said that the Moon arc is a poem and that you're inviting you're inviting the future discoverer to in. So yeah, what will they discover? It's such a fascinating idea. Yeah, sure. The Moon arc is four separate chambers. We have the Earth chamber, which is speaking to our natural context, the larger situation for humanity in nature. Then we go to the metastere, which is the communication structures and the technologies that exist between the surface of the Earth and the surface of the Moon that today are shaping what it's like to be human, how we communicate the information we consume and so forth and the apparatus that allows that to happen. Then we get into the Moon chamber. The Moon chamber is really a museum and it's all right. It's an homage to the Moon looking across time and space and culture, different poetic statements, whether they're written, visual, sculptural, in homage to the Moon as a creative muse. Then beyond that is the ether chamber. That really speaks to everything that exists outside of our solar system. It's sort of the unknown. It's the known unknowns. When you stack the chambers together, it really is a bit of a silhouette of a human, an abstraction of humans. The lowest chamber being the Earth chamber, that's our roots on the ground. The ether chamber is our head looking up at the stars and contemplating. The content, the physical structures in the Moon arc are nearly identical to the four chambers. There's an exoskeleton. There are four sapphire discs that have engraved platinum on them with high-resolution images that scale to about 12,000 dots per inch. Very high-resolution platinum deposits. We have titanium rings with engraved music. We also have five, what we call microchambers. They're gold tube bevels that are laser-welded vacuum chambers that have physical contents in them. Within each chamber, there are 10 of those. Those are the consistent elements that are identical, those structures. What's on them are different. There are nipple cobalt murals with some proprietary coatings for color that are circumnavigating the discs and the structure. Each chamber is held together by a stanchion, which is a very particular sculptural depiction that changes through each. We have consistent elements across each chamber, and then we have particulars for each. The earthly stuff is very, very concrete. We have rock samples and water samples from the five oceans and depictions of maps of the largest migrators. This is really Earth to Moon and what the Moon does to stir life on Earth and how life is unfolding. As we get to the ether chamber, we get into more abstract relationships. We're looking at concentrations of many different pollen, many different tree saps, many different dirt, many different waters. These amalgamations that talk to the integration of different life forms on our planet and the symbiosis that happens. If the Earth chamber is a very literal depiction of what are the animals and how do they live together and what is the context of humanity, the ether chamber by comparison is really about the abstract contemplations of what is human in the greater context of the universe and the greater context of life forms on Earth. We'll be right back. I'm looking at the visual exploded view on the Moon Arts website as you're describing it. It's a beautiful object of art, but with so much meaning in there. It's just, I'm a little speechless because there's just so much to it. It makes me think so much about what we're choosing to place in these incredible places like the Moon. I know that was not the final destination for the space bound one, but there is a version of it in the Smithsonian as it should be. But it's also just that broader conversation of its intent to be on the Moon and we're at this place now where we are attempting, or in some cases successfully putting more and more landers on the Moon and we are bringing our humanity with us to the Moon and what we want to leave for future generations to find and how purposeful we need to be about this. This is so purposeful and so beautiful. Beauty is not something that often I think of when we think of things we put on the Moon, but it's so wonderful to see beauty being sent there, almost like it's holding up a mirror to the Moon that has inspired humanity since time immemorial. An object of appreciation. I'm sorry, I'm waxing poetic myself because this is so beautiful. This is so wonderful. It's like we're giving the Moon her flowers. It's so lovely. It's a love letter to the Moon in a way. It's an aspirational object because at its very core there's a belief and a hope that humanity will persist. If we've designed it to last hundreds of thousands of years, then we all humans are designed to last hundreds of thousands of years. That speaks a bit of the complexity that poetry, like I said, leaves space for the imagination to fill in. The narrative has many, many gaps in it so that the human experience in that day of the distant future can fill it in and make sense of it according to their culture, to their experience and so forth. Much like what we do with long-lived architecture and archaeological finds, we make sense of it in our context. That's really important. It's not about getting a truth that has to persist. Someone needs to know this in the future. Now, we're inviting people to discover us and learn who we are today as a global society and understand that there are things that bind us all together in the human experience that should be celebrated and for them at that distant date to uncover a little bit of that poetic about humanity today, which I think is kind of special. Yeah, it's dense. It's super articulate inside, meaning that it's built like a cathedral. Each of these chambers has as much information as a cathedral does. You think, why do cathedrals take or why did they take decades and decades to complete or in the case of Gaudi's masterpiece in Barcelona still being completed? These are ethic efforts that bring people together through the experience. One thing that we really wanted to say is that we are all now existing in the time of Moon Ark. Moon Ark was created and for those of us who are very, very close to the project, it was the center of our creative practice for about the last 15 or 16 years. But for the later context, we're going to be doing everyone is living in the time of Moon Ark. This is our cathedral. For those of us who are closer to the story or greater team across the world, this is the moment of something that they contributed to that's much larger than all of us. And it's not the greatest, most grand gesture in the world, but it's a step towards more grand gestures that we can make as a cooperative to start to talk about, again, what unites us and what brings us together as people across this planet. I think that's an incredible discussion to be having. I hope we see, I mean, this is not a small effort. As you said, it took many, many years. I hope we see more efforts like this continuing. And I mean, to me, this is what being human is all about, is this kind of beauty and softfulness into what we're doing. I have to ask, I mean, we are putting more landers on the Moon. Are you involved in anything else like this, that future looking for any future missions? Well, we are in the sense that we've spoken to other space agencies that want to do similar projects. And, you know, I often said this at the beginning of the project. Our team grew from four of us in a room to about 300 people around the world. And no one ever said no when we asked them for something. And the Moon is such an attractor that, of course, you say yes. And one thing we had to set out was what was motivating people to be part of the team? Was it ego? I want to get my piece on the Moon so I can say that I have a piece on the Moon? Or did they buy into this larger cooperative effort? And the rest that's involved, too, because we weren't sure if it was going to make it. And we know how that plays out. So it's the effort and the experience. And so what I think of the other space agencies now, it's like, yeah, this is a great effort, but it's not about the artifact in its own right. It's about the process by which you bring people together to make statements and communicate about important issues or values or ethics. Things that are greater than I have a piece that I need that goes to the Moon and there it fits. Because at the end of the day, everything we put on the Moon is going to be space junk. Every lander that goes on a mission will time out when the batteries die, when the mission is over, and we have no means to reclaim it. So MoonArk, being such a prominent cultural artifact on this maiden commercial voyage, was aimed at making a heritage site out of the defunct spacecraft. And so we were able in the early years to begin to integrate some of the foreign language of MoonArk to inspire some of the foreign language in the lander. And so once we start to see that this cultural artifact is having visual influence on the design of the lander, it's starting to get shared language across. And that's important. And I think that's where we go next. I think the next version for us, our PROM project, we're looking at how do we integrate cultural payload into the design of the spacecraft so it's not just payload on, it's payload within. Yes, draft on. Right. Yep. Yeah. So we're integrated. And that was our spacecraft into cultural artifacts. And ultimately, everything we send out there will be a depiction of humanity. And if it's beautiful and functional and technologically supreme and does all the things, whoever discovers that, whether it's our future selves just knowing that it's out there, like the boy had shirt, right? It's great. Yes, exactly. Yep. But how many people have come and gone through that project? The project persists over many lifetimes. And so you form your relationship to it. And there were the mechanics who built it, right? The engineers who had their hands on the spacecraft. And then there are those that are writing the code to keep it functional today and receiving signals from it who've never touched it and have no idea what its scale or its weight or its totality is, but they have a bond. And these special artifacts that when we create them, it's a moment for us to step outside of our own individual lives and existences and to look at these larger shared experiences. And I think that's what's special about the large project. I agree. And it is amazing to think when humanity is long, long, long gone from Earth, eons from now, the voyagers will probably still be our representatives out there. So truly, you know, let's be purposeful about what else we send out and maybe make them pretty for lack of a better terminology. Why not? Well, I was going to say that, you know, I think beauty is, that's a slippery slope. Fair enough. But you know it when you see it. And by today's standards, we might look at Moon, Arkansas, what? Well, it's like really visually interesting or it's beautiful or it's smaller than I thought it was, you know, like people will have a reaction to it. And so far it's been really positive. But in the future, you know, aesthetic sensitivity might change and the sensibilities that someone might have at the time, like they're like, "Oh, where did that come from?" And so, you know, how they look at it, I think, you know, I want to be there at the moment someone discovers it for the first time and ask them make sense of it. And what do they gravitate towards? What's important to them? What's a discovery or what do they know? And, you know, that in its own right is poetry and it's a hypothetical because the reality is that, you know, there's been so much written about the project right now. And like you mentioned, it's in the Smithsonian. So there is a record. And for however long that record lasts, someone will be able to perform scholarship on it. And I'm really curious that like at such a distance when there is no scholarship, when language changes, you know, when humans are just fundamentally different and how they make sense of us as, you know, these ancients, you know, that once were. I think that's really intriguing to think about. That's it for T minus deep space brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey and the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. T minus deep space is produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
