"Grissom and Young," by Norman Rockwell. Courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

Since 1963, hundreds of artists (and musicians, poets—even one fashion designer) have interpreted NASA’s aeronautic and space projects. The artists were given carte blanche to create what they wanted, in any medium, on any subject. In celebration of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, more than 70 diverse artworks from the program began touring the country as part of an exhibition titled NASA / ART: 50 Years of Exploration. On Saturday the exhibition will open at the National Air and Space Museum, where it will remain on display through October 9.

Interested in the backstory to Norman Rockwell’s painting, above?  According to NASA’s history of the art program, Rockwell “desperately wanted a spacesuit so he could get all the details in his painting of Grissom and Young suiting up for the Gemini 3 mission. But NASA officials refused on the grounds that there was a lot of secret technology in the suits and they couldn’t release one. [Program manager James] Dean worked as the go-between, and it was not looking good.

“‘I had [Mercury astronaut] Deke Slayton mad at me on one side and Norman Rockwell aggravated at me on the other.’ Dean recalled.

“The compromise was that a technician accompanied the suit up to Rockwell’s studio and sat with it every day as Rockwell worked. The technician’s reward was to be included in the piece as one of the people helping the astronauts.”

It takes two: NASM curator Tom Crouch (left) and NASA's Bert Ulrich, oversee the more than 3,000 artworks in NASA's art collection. Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

At a recent preview of the exhibition, Tom Crouch, curator of art at the National Air and Space Museum, explained that the Museum maintains the majority of the collection (about 2,100 pieces), dating from 1963 to the early 1980s, while NASA holds the remainder (about 800 pieces).  In the collection, “you’ll see paintings that are heavily symbolic, and paintings that are representational,” said Crouch. Among the symbolic pieces are E.V. Day’s 2006 work Wheel of Optimism, which features a whimsical Martian landscape placed inside the prototype wheel of one of the Mars rovers. A more representational piece is photographer Annie Leibovitz’s 1999 portrait of Eileen Collins, the first female shuttle pilot (Discovery, 1995), and first female shuttle commander (Columbia, 1999).

Visitors can also see artworks by James Wyeth, William Wegman, Andy Warhol, and Robert T. McCall, as well as clothing designed by Stephen Sprouse featuring 3-D images based on Mars Pathfinder imagery. Or they can listen to music composed by Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet.

Actress Nichelle Nichols (better known as Lt. Uhura from "Star Trek" with Clayton Pond's "Strange Encounter for the First Time." Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

Also at the preview was actress Nichelle Nichols, best known as Lt. Uhura from the television show “Star Trek” (shown at left with Clayton Pond’s 1981 silkscreen Strange Encounter for the First Time). “I wish I had this in my home,” said Nichols. “The entire exhibit,” she continued, “displays the arrogance of man’s imagination. And arrogance can be a wonderful thing.”

See more selections from the show here.

• Tomorrow STS-134 astronaut Mike Fincke will become the U.S. record holder for time spent in space, eclipsing chief astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 377-day mark.  Not bad for a guy who once washed out of Air Force fighter pilot training. “My arms weren’t golden enough to be a really great pilot,” he jokes.  Plus, he’s one of the rare astronauts with his own page on the Internet Movie Database. He even appeared (in animated form) on the kids’ show “Arthur.”

• “Water Bear” may be too cute a name for creatures that can withstand radiation, total vacuum, and temperatures near absolute zero, which is what a bunch of tardigrades (their formal name) did for 10 days on the Foton-M3 mission in 2007. Tardigrades are one of only three animals—the others are brine shrimp and a type of African midge larvae—known to have survived in open space. (Bacteria have, too, although the old Apollo 12 story that bacteria survived three years on the lunar surface turns out to be false.) The Planetary Society launched tardigrades, along with several other hardy organisms, on STS-134 as a trial run for a more ambitious experiment to be flown on the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars. Researchers want to know if organisms could have survived a trip from Mars to Earth locked inside a meteorite. So to simulate (roughly) that voyage, they’ll be sealed inside tubes and sent on a 34-month round trip to Mars. Then scientists will try to revive them when they return to Earth. The shuttle experiment is a trial run to check out the hardware and handling procedures.

• Another small payload that deserves more attention is  the “Sprite” satellite on a chip sponsored by Cornell University. Last week astronauts Drew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff attached these chip satellites, along with other material samples, to the outside of the space station to see how exposure to space affects them. Cornell’s Mason Peck envisions chip-size satellites being used someday for interstellar missions. I’m happy to see any progress, however modest, in that direction.

…Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

I’ve never much liked this argument. If it’s true (and I’m not sure it is) that we’re doomed to destroy ourselves because “our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts,” wouldn’t we just carry our dysfunctional habits with us to the moon and Mars? What would we gain?

Here’s another plan: Let’s work on curbing our selfishness and aggression (a Grand Challenge for 21st Century sociology?) so that the six billion of us left on Earth have a better chance of preventing/surviving a catastrophe, whether natural or self-inflicted. If the world ends, it won’t be much consolation to me (or probably to them) that 100 people survived on a moon base.

While the U.S. space program is mired in political arguments over how to reach Earth orbit (something we’ve known how to do for 50 years), Japan’s space agency JAXA, with far less money, is about to take a small but noteworthy step into the future.

An HII-A launcher is scheduled to lift off from the Tanegashima Space Center early on the morning of May 21, Japan time (Note: Launch postponed from May 18), with two spacecraft on board: a Venus orbiter called Akatsuki, and a smaller craft called IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun). With all due respect to Venus researchers, it’s the second payload that really interests me.

Solar sailing has long been suggested as a cheap, efficient way to cross vast stretches of space without having to carry whopping amounts of rocket fuel. Turn your sail into the sunlight, wait a while, and you’ll start building up speed. No fuel required, just photon pressure.

Due to a series of launch mishaps, the technology has never advanced much beyond ground tests. Now IKAROS actually hopes to go somewhere. It will ride alongside Akatsuki to Venus, swing past the planet, then go into orbit around the sun.

Because this is a technology demo and not a science mission, the JAXA engineers will be halfway to happiness if the sail just deploys properly. The 65-foot-diagonal square sail is made of a material called polyimide, just 7.5 microns in diameter, not much thicker than spider silk. It will unfurl from a spinning spool (start watching the Japanese-language video below at about the 6:50 mark to see the deployment). Tip weights at the corners provide tension—the sail has no frame.

The other key technology IKAROS is meant to demonstrate is power generation. About 5 percent of the sail’s surface is covered with thin-film solar cells, which will produce electricity. JAXA intends to follow the IKAROS demo later this decade by sending a larger (165-foot diagonal) sail to Jupiter and the Trojan asteroids, which will require  additional thrust from ion drive—powered by the solar cells fixed to the sail.

It sounds ambitious, but the Japanese have been working on solar sail technology for years, and according to IKAROS project head Osamu Mori, this time they think they have a winning design, particularly when it comes to the material.

The idea for a solar sail first appeared about 100 years ago. Since then, there has been a lot of research done on this in western countries as well as Japan, but so far no one has made a breakthrough. One of the reasons for this is that the technology didn’t exist to reliably produce a lightweight thin film for the sail, which is very important. This film has to be made from a material that’s not just lightweight but can withstand extreme radiation and heat in space. The material that meets these conditions is polyimide resin, which is used as a foam insulation for satellites. Once such a high-quality material became available, the development of a solar sail came much closer to reality. Today, Japan has the largest market share in the world for polyimide resin. We are currently leading the race to develop applications for this technology, and it would mean a great deal to us to be the first in the world to build a working solar sail.

If all goes well, IKAROS will unfurl its wispy membrane about a month after launch, then set sail for Venus.

Ya gotta be rooting for this one.

Voyager 2's long, lonely trip.

Let’s hope they’re able to solve the problem. The twin Voyagers, which are speeding outward at better than nine miles a second, are our best chance to cross the “heliopause” where the solar wind yields to the charged particle “winds” of interstellar space. That could happen sometime in the next 10 years or so, which is about how long the nuclear batteries and thruster fuel are expected to last.

Clarke also reflects on the advances made in replacing body parts with prostheses, which, at some future point, would lead humans to discard flesh and blood altogether. Clarke supposes that the extra-terrestrials who had visited Earth at the beginning of his book were well past this stage: “…out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.”

For humans, Clarke wrote, “…eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last…But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh and blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, man had called ‘spirit.’ ”

We’re not there yet. But Clarke, who died in March 2008, would probably enjoy the following video.

Although, having freed himself (presumably) from matter, he may be working on a book about bigger questions…

LightSail 1, the way we hope it will look next year. (Planetary Society)

The history of solar sailing is basically the story of Charlie Brown and the football. It remains a great concept, a technology that could theoretically take us to the stars. But for all their promise, actual solar sail missions tend to end in failure, usually before they even begin, and often through no fault of their own.

Notable disappointments include the Planetary Society’s Cosmos 1, which in 2005 got dumped into the ocean by an errant Volna rocket immediately after launch. Ditto NASA’s Nanosail-D in 2008, except that this time it was a Falcon 1 rocket that failed.

Now, thanks to a $1 million anonymous donation, the Planetary Society is ready to try again with a spacecraft called LightSail, the first of which is due to reach orbit late next year (assuming the Society can raise the rest of the project’s estimated cost of “under $2 million”).

I wish them the best of luck. And I hope when they do fly, they’ll include a nifty experiment that was planned for Cosmos 1, but never got the chance to be tested. Back then physicist Gregory Benford, who’s probably better known as a science fiction writer, along with his brother James, president of Microwave Sciences near San Francisco, proposed hitting Cosmos-1 with a ground-based microwave beam to see if it could impart a modicum of acceleration.

Microwave or laser beam propulsion has been proposed as a way to push sail-equipped starships to fantastic speeds. We’re a long way from building such vehicles, but the Benfords’ experiment was at least a way to get started by testing the basic physics.

Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society, arguably the world’s foremost champion of solar sailing and director of the LightSail program, says it’s too early to say whether a beaming experiment will be included. “I would like to do it, but we have not addressed it yet,” he writes by email.

Let’s hope it works out. And best of luck, too, to the Japanese space agency JAXA, which is planning its own solar sail mission in 2010, called IKAROS.