Encapsulating humanity for the Moon and beyond
Mark Baskinger has promised the moon to hundreds of people over the past decade. He’s a designer and chair of the Products Track at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. For the past 10 years, he and fellow CMU faculty members have been shepherding the MoonArk project, a mini museum of humanity that will be ferried to the moon on the first commercial rover developed by Pittsburgh-based CMU-spinout Astrobotic. A launch is scheduled for sometime next year.
The capsule consists of four chambers, each 2 inches tall. Inside, etched onto sapphire disks and metal plates, there’s blood and poetry and water from all five oceans, a ballet, some Carbon 60, and something called “the sound of gravity.” The chambers contain the creative contributions of hundreds of artists and engineers and represent the human experience of the earth, the moon, the space between them, and the ether — everything else. The “cultural payload” will have no manual and no microscope to view it. It will be up to future humans to see it through their eyes.
In September, Mr. Baskinger and his colleagues laid eyes on this capsule for the last time. It was the first cargo loaded onto the Astrobotic Peregrine lander. It has since been joined by some NASA equipment and other can’t-be-disclosed payloads. Mr. Baskinger is already thinking about the next moon capsule. And maybe one for Mars “and beyond.”
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Q. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Oh, my God, we forgot to include this critical aspect of humanity?’
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For us, it’s the start. It’s the start of other breadcrumbs that will come after it and begin to speak to it. It’s not a matter of, ‘Oh, we missed this.’ But it’s more like, ‘We said this. Now, what do say?’
It would be a bottomless quest to try to gather everything we could. Or, if we were overly conscious of curating it, the narrative might be too honed. I think everyone has their lenses and their bias for it. I’m very comfortable with that. See what you want to see in it and allow that to kind of settle in and then resonate.
Q. Are you already thinking about the next thing that you’re going to send to the moon?
What I learned is that the richness of the world isn’t always what makes the headlines. It’s the sub narratives. It’s the stories that happen over here and over there, which we don’t have access to. We want to amplify those voices and translate those into visual stories.
Q. Can give me an example?
We’ve talked a lot about craft practices that are going away. And the importance of craft practices today. And there’s so much regionalism, localism, and indigenous wisdom in craft practices. Once they go away, they’re really difficult to bring back. So we’re really interested in how we might preserve some of that. Just from my own experience, the university that I was at eliminated their printmaking program (because) it was too expensive. That started a cascade of, ‘Well, let’s get rid of ceramics’ and ‘Let’s get rid of glassblowing.’ All these craft practices… for me, they’re really important because the products that we buy today are so distant from the earth. My MacBook, although it’s made from aluminum, and it’s got oil in it, like, in the plastics, it’s so not earthly. And the craft practices bridge that, found-on-theside-the-hill stone and the MacBook. They allow us to have transit between the purely artificial and the purely natural.
Q. How much did it cost you guys to put it together?
We were given an initial grant of $100,000 from an anonymous donor. And that was enough to initiate a space arts conference on campus, launch the moon arts group, and to provide seed funding to at least do manufacturing.
Q. $100,000 was enough for all of that?!
It wasn’t at all. The College of Fine Arts, and the studio for Creative Inquiry both gave us some small grants along the way. So, for like about $115,000, we were able to do all of this.
And if we put a material cost like material and fabrication costs to it, we’re at about half a million dollars. If we put an artistic cost to it, I think, a couple million. But the fabricators who did the cages for us, they cut their fees by two thirds or three quarters. They just wanted to do it. And so they did it at or below cost. Everyone who donated artifacts or collected water for us from around the world, they did it on their own dime and mailed it to us. So we didn’t really have to pay for those inclusions. The fabricator for the Sapphire discs, they cut their costs tremendously just to be associated with the project. So I think a lot of people got
PR mileage out of it, which is fine — that’s great.
Q. Is the MoonArk capsule just going to be (dropped) somewhere on the surface of the Moon?
No. It’ll be attached to the lander. Because of the cultural payload, the lander changes after its two week mission of exploratory and diagnostic work. Once all that stuff is done and nightfall hits and all the power supplies die, everything is going to be in stasis. So the cultural payload helps make that a marker: This is the first commercial mission to the moon.
Q. As in, it’s not just a vehicle?
Right. The question behind it is, if we’re going to have this reach, if NASA’s mission, and every space agency’s mission is to move humanity further and further out into the universe, we are inherently going to drag our culture with us, right? We just will. What are we taking? What are we putting out there? And why are we doing it? This is not just about opening the lunar gateway, so we can launch rockets to Mars, and then we can own Mars. It’s not about colonization and conquest. It’s about that more thoughtful reach.
Q. What did you think you were going to do with your life when you were a kid? I mean, you couldn’t have imagined this right?
No. No, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I was like, ‘I’m gonna go dig up dinosaurs.’