Dancing and painting in space? NASA will take one small step today in its plan for people to eventually live and work off Earth, when art students find out what micro-gravity does to the creative process.
NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program will take two San Francisco Art Institute students aboard a KC135 turbojet that will fly in a series of parabolic maneuvers to 20-second periods of near-weightlessness, alternating with periods of acceleration of up to two Gs.
During today's flight, interdisciplinary artists Elizabeth Allbee Abascal and Kris Shapiro will dance, in a collaboration to study how objects are deformed when they collide during micro-gravity.
Fellow team members Frank Pietronegro and Clovis Blackwell get their chance to float on 4 April, when they plan to explore fluid oscillations and the behavior of viscous fluids -- in other words, the effect of micro-gravity on painting materials.
The four-member team will be joined on the jet by 46 other teams chosen to participate in the program, which is designed to teach college students more than academics.
"We're trying to help scientists learn at a young age that it's not enough to generate data, you have to use this data for something," said Donn Sickorez, university affairs officer for Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas where the program takes place.
The program is sponsored by NASA and administered by the Texas Space Grant Consortium. Teams are selected based on their proposals for experiments and for later presentation of their findings to their communities.
This was the second year the program was open to schools throughout the United States, with 48 teams selected from a field of 97 (one chosen team dropped out).
The San Francisco Art Institute is the only art school that has been selected for the program.
Teams are typically science and math majors, studying such things as "the effects of hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings and container shape on fluids and containers in microgravity environment" -- one of last year's projects undertaken by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.
The Art Institute team members are participating as science students, and will receive credit toward their science requirement at the school. They bring their own tools -- paint tubes, video cameras and leotards -- and have their own concerns.
"I was making paintings that were thicker and thicker and coming off the wall, so I wanted to paint them in mid-air," said Pietronegro, who initiated the project at the Art Institute. "I'm using as a method creative painting techniques, looking at viscous materials like gel medium. I'll put them into cake-decorating tools, project them into space. I know how the materials will operate in gravity, so I'll see what happens in a weightless environment."
This approach is fine with NASA.
"The educational experience is just as valuable as the science that comes out," Sickorez said. "From an engineering standpoint, the artists' tools might be simple. But they're looking at phenomena from a different perspective, so I don't think it's a good comparison (with the engineering students)."
He added that the goal for all students in the program, regardless of their discipline, is "not to do groundbreaking work, but to learn how to do science."
Pietronegro's proposal said that "creativity, when bridged with the analytic activities of the astronaut, will enrich the quality of life for future space travelers." The review panel evidently agreed.
"The line blurs" between science and art, said Burke Fort, project director program and manager of special projects for the Texas Space Grant Consortium. "I think there's a very fertile intersection of the two worlds. Art is personal creativity and a lot of what the space program is about is personal creativity."
On a more pragmatic level, Fort said, NASA is already doing "human factors research."
When the international space station is assembled and permanently crewed, Fort said, humans would have to learn how to deal with the psychological and emotional challenges of being in space for a long period of time. "What might be the emotional fall-out of never being able to go out on a sunny day, of looking out your window on the surface of Mars and seeing that pale blue dot (of the earth)?" Fort asked. "How are people going to handle that?"
Fort said that he suspects art will be one way. The presence of the artists is, he said, "a baby step in adding to the body of knowledge about how to take care of people in space."
