Aleksandra Mir
GRAVITY
The Eternal Countdown
Calendar 2008
January 2008
1
2
3
January 1, 1945: A German V2 rocket
hits Antwerp, killing 45, injuring 33 and
destroying 21 houses.
7
8
15
5
6
12
13
January 4, 1958: Sputnik I falls back to
Earth.
9
10
11
January 10, 1962: An American X-15A
sub-orbital space plane makes an emergency landing at Mud Lake Nevada after
an engine fails to light up.
January 11, 1920: Dr Robert Goddard is
met with public derision when he publishes ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme
Altitudes’, advocating the use of multistage rockets to explore space.
16
17
18
19
20
23
24
25
26
27
January 7, 1948: Captain Thomas F.
Mantell of the Kentucky Air National
Guard plummets to his death while pursuing a flying saucer over Fort Knox.
14
4
January 15, 1995: Japan’s Express I
rocket veers wildly off course during
launch, its re-entry vehicle ending up in
Ghana.
21
22
January 21, 1959: The first test launch
of a rocket to carry the Corona spy
satellite fails 60 minutes prior to takeoff.
28
January 28, 1986: A ‘major malfunction’
aboard Space Shuttle Challenger claims
the lives of all seven crewmembers.
January 26, 1995: A Chinese ‘Long
January 27, 1967: Virgil Grissom,
March’ 2E rocket carrying a telecommu- Edward White and Roger Chaffee die in
nications satellite explodes after blasting a fire while training aboard Apollo I.
off from Xichang in southwest Sichuan
province.
29
30
31
February 2008
1
2
February 1, 2003: Space Shuttle Columbia
disintegrates on re-entry, killing its entire crew.
4
5
6
3
February 3, 1967: Joe Meek, responsible for
the pop hit ‘Telstar’, fatally shoots his landlady
before turning the shotgun on himself.
7
8
9
10
14
15
16
17
February 14, 1996: A Chinese ‘Long March’
rocket explodes 22 seconds after takeoff from
the Xichang site, killing six and injuring 57.
February 15, 1996: A rocket carrying an
Intelsat 708 satellite explodes after takeoff
from China’s Xichang launch site.
21
22
23
24
February 22, 1990: An Ariane rocket carrying
two Japanese satellites explodes two minutes
after lift-off from the ESA launch centre in
Kourou, French Guiana.
February 23, 2004: A rocket motor catches fire
at the Sriharikota space centre in India, killing
six and injuring another three.
February 6 1971: Apollo XIV astronauts Alan
Shepard and Ed Mitchell throw excess equipment from the Lunar Module to lighten it
before lift-off from the Moon.
11
18
12
19
13
20
February 18, 1966: Disgraced former cosmonaut Grigoriy Nelyubov, his presence removed
from official photographs, drunkenly throws
himself under a train near Vladivostock.
25
26
27
February 26 1965: Extraterrestrials visit alien
February 27, 1966: A system failure on Soviet
contactee George Adamski to ‘bid him farewell’ probe Venera 2 as it passes Venus means that
prior to his death from a massive heart attack. no data is sent back to Earth.
28
29
March 2008
3
4
5
1
2
6
7
8
9
13
14
15
16
March 5, 1958: Explorer II fails to
enter Earth orbit.
10
11
12
March 14, 1944: Wernher von
Braun arrested by Gestapo for
stating that he wants to build a
spaceship instead of V2 rockets.
17
18
19
20
March 18, 1980: A Vostok rocket
explodes while being refuelled,
killing over 50 ground crew at the
Pletetsk Space Centre, USSR.
23
24
25
March 23, 1961: Cosmonaut
Valentin Bondarenko dies horribly
when fire breaks out in an oxygen-rich pressure chamber used
for space flight training.
March 24, 2006: Falcon 1’s payload is irreparably damaged following the failure of its first
attempt to enter Earth orbit.
March 26, 1987: An Atlas G
Centaur taking off from Cape
Canaveral is destroyed after lightning strikes its guidance system,
forcing the rocket to veer off
course.
31
26
21
22
March 21, 2007: Premature
engine shutdown marks the end
of the second attempt made by
Elon Musk’s Falcon 1 to enter
Earth orbit.
March 22, 1997: In California, 39
members of the Heaven’s Gate
community commit suicide believing they will be picked up by a
UFO hiding behind the Hale Bopp
Comet.
27
28
March 27, 1968: Yuri Gagarin, the
first man into space, dies in a
plane crash outside Kirzhach in
the USSR.
March 28, 1968: Sergey
Korolyov’s plan to develop artificial-gravity experiments on board
Voskhod and Soyuz spacecraft is
shelved by his successor, Vasily
Mishin.
29
April 2008
1
2
3
4
9
10
11
5
April 1, 1968: Marshall McLuhan falls asleep during
an advance screening of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey in New York.
6
7
8
April 7, 1971: Cosmonauts Vladimir Shatalov, Alexi
Leonov and Georgy Dobrovolsky publicly criticize the
poor quality of the ‘space food’ on Salyut 1.
12
April 11, 1970: Astronaut Jim Lovell’s wife Marilyn
drops her wedding ring down the bathroom drain just
as Apollo XIII is about to take off.
13
14
April 13, 1970: Accidentally exposed wire causes
Apollo XIII’s number two oxygen tank to explode
199,990 miles from Earth.
April 14, 1958: Sputnik II falls back to Earth.
18
19
April 18, 1986: A Titan missile carrying a military
satellite explodes shortly after launch from the
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
April 19, 1959: Otis Carr’s OTC-X1 flying saucer fails
to lift off from Oklahoma’s Frontier City following a
‘mercury leak’ in the main cabin area.
24
25
April 24, 1967: Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed
when his Soyuz 1 spacecraft crashes upon re-entry
due to parachute failure.
20
15
16
17
21
22
23
April 21, 2007: A NASA contract engineer shoots one
hostage in the chest and then turns the gun on himself during an armed siege at the Johnson Space
Centre in Houston, Texas.
26
27
April 27, 1999: The payload shroud on the Ikonos I
imaging satellite fails to separate four minutes after
launch, bringing the vehicle back down over the South
Pacific.
28
May 2008
1
2
May 1, 2006: Founder of modern space medicine,
Dr Hubertus Strughold has his name removed from
the International Space Hall of Fame after it is
linked to experiments carried out at Dachau during
WWII.
5
6
7
May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard is forced to urinate in
his spacesuit following delays to the launch of
America’s first manned mission into space as a
urine collection system is not included on such a
short flight.
12
8
May 8, 1961: President John F Kennedy drops
NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal while presenting it to Alan Shepard at a ceremony held in the
White House Rose Garden.
3
4
May 3, 1986: A Delta rocket carrying a meteorological satellite explodes shortly after lift-off from
Cape Canaveral.
May 9, 1967: Booster failure results in US spy
satellite KH-4A going into the wrong orbit, severely
impairing its surveillance capabilities.
10
11
16
17
18
23
24
25
May 23, 1958: Explorer I, the first satellite to carry
a mission payload, ceases transmission.
May 24, 1962: Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter
brings his capsule down 300 km beyond the
splashdown site, effectively ending his career at
NASA.
30
31
9
13
14
15
May 15, 1958: Sputnik III is launched with a defective tape machine onboard and consequently fails
to detect the Van Allen Belt.
19
20
21
22
May 20, 1997: A Russian Zenit-2 booster carrying
a Cosmos military satellite blows up 48 seconds
into launch.
26
27
28
29
May 30, 1955: After ten years as head of the
Soviet rocketry programme, Korolyov’s arrest and
imprisonment under Stalin are finally rescinded
June 2008
1
2
9
3
4
June 3, 1965: Gemini IV astronaut Ed White loses a
glove while becoming the first American to walk in
space.
June 4, 1996: Europe’s Ariane-5 rocket explodes forty
seconds into its maiden flight from Kourou, French
Guiana.
10
11
5
6
7
8
12
13
14
15
19
20
21
22
28
29
June 11, 1986: Space illustrator Chesley Bonestell
dies having never left the planet.
16
17
June 16, 1977: Wernher von Braun, creator of the
Saturn V rocket, dies having never left the planet.
June 17, 1952: Rocket scientist and occultist Jack
June 18, 1991: A Prospector rocket is destroyed
Parsons blows himself to pieces while handling chem- after veering off course following its launch from Cape
icals at his Pasadena home.
Canaveral.
18
23
24
25
June 24, 1969: Space advocate Willy Ley dies, having June 25, 1990: An aberration in the primary mirror
never left the planet.
severely impairs the Hubble space telescope’s performance.
30
June 20, 1996: A Soyuz-U rocket carrying reconnaissance satellites explodes after launching from the
Plesetsk Cosmodrome at Arkhangelsk Oblast.
26
27
June 28, 1958: Explorer III falls back to Earth
July 2008
1
2
3
4
July 2, 1947: Rancher William ‘Mack’
Brazel reports finding the debris of a
crashed flying saucer outside Roswell
New Mexico.
7
8
9
July 8, 1999: Apollo astronaut Pete
Conrad, the third man to walk on the
Moon, dies from internal injuries following a motorcycle accident in Oija,
California.
5
6
July 5, 1999: A 200-kg chunk of engine
debris falls into the courtyard of a private house following the launch of a
Russian Proton-K rocket in Kazakhstan.
10
11
12
July 10, 1963: Director of the Cosmonaut July 11, 1979: Skylab falls back to
Training Centre Mikhail Odintsov accuses Earth in a shower of hot debris.
Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman
into space, of being drunk when she
reported to the launch pad and of insubordination during the flight.
13
July 13, 1957: The USAF cancels its
Navaho missile programme, causing
over 15,600 workers to be laid off.
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
July 26, 2007: Three engineers are
killed and three others critically injured
in a massive explosion while testing the
flow of nitrous oxide on SpaceshipTwo
at the Mojave airport.
July 27, 2007: NASA reveals that on
two separate occasions astronauts were
so intoxicated prior to takeoff that their
condition ‘raised concerns’ regarding
flight safety.
July 21, 1968: The Block D stage on
July 22, 1998: Alan Shepard, the first
the Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft explodes on American into space and the fifth man
the launch pad, killing three technito walk on the Moon, dies of leukaemia.
cians.
28
29
30
31
August 2008
1
2
3
August 2, 1993: A Titan 4 carrying a military spy
satellite explodes after lift-off from Vandenberg AFB.
4
5
6
7
8
9
August 8, 1967: Yuri Gagarin is removed from the list
of active cosmonauts after the Soviet leadership
decides he is too important to be selected for further
space missions.
10
11
August 10, 1945: Rocketry pioneer Dr Robert Goddard
dies in Baltimore, having never left the planet.
12
13
14
August 12, 1998: The Titan rocket programme is suspended following an in-flight explosion, causing over
$1 billion dollars in damage.
16
17
15
August 15, 2002: NASA’s Contour space probe,
designed to study comets, breaks up on leaving
Earth’s atmosphere.
18
19
20
21
25
26
27
August 17, 1958: The first attempt to send up US
lunar probe Pioneer I ends in failure after an explosion
rips apart the booster rocket 77 seconds after launch.
22
August 22 2003: A VLS-1 rocket explodes at Brazil’s
space centre, killing 21 ground staff.
23
24
August 24, 2007: Charged with attempted kidnapping, assault and burglary, former NASA astronaut
Lisa Nawak asks that her ankle-mounted GPS monitoring device be removed.
August 27, 1998: A Delta 3 rocket carrying a communications satellite bursts into a $225 million fireball on
its maiden launch from Cape Canaveral.
September 2008
1
2
September 1, 1957: Premature release
of jet vanes on a Soviet Burya ICBM
causes it to arc over on clearing the
launch tower and crash in a huge ball
of flames.
September 2, 1970: Apollo missions XV
and XIX are bumped from the schedule
after Congress cuts NASA appropriations for the coming financial year.
8
9
4
5
6
7
September 7, 1990: Part of a Titan
rocket falls from a crane and bursts into
flames at Edwards AFB, killing one and
injuring several others.
10
11
September 10, 2002: Apollo astronaut
Buzz Aldrin punches a man in the face
outside the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills
after the latter claims he never actually
walked on the Moon.
September 11, 1958: ARPA rejects von
Braun’s suggestion of using a military
rocket to put a man into space by the
end of 1959.
16
17
23
24
September 8, 2004: Parachute failure
causes the Genesis space probe to
smash into the desert at Dugway
Proving Ground in Utah.
15
3
12
13
14
18
19
20
21
25
26
27
28
September 15, 1972: NASA announces
disciplinary measures against the crew
of Apollo XV for taking 398 unauthorized postage stamp covers to the Moon
for onward sale to private collectors.
22
September 23, 1999: Confusion
between imperial with metric measurement causes NASA’s $125 million Mars
Climate Orbiter to break up as it enters
the Martian atmosphere.
29
30
September 30, 1933: Raketenflugplatz,
the world’s first rocket port, established
near Frankfurt in Germany, closes after
its owner is unable to pay the water bill.
September 27, 1960: ‘Phantom cosmonaut’ Ivan Kachur is allegedly killed during an orbital flight several months
before Gagarin becomes the first man
into space.
October 2008
6
13
1
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
October 7, 2005: A test model of the
Demonstrator spacecraft goes missing
after launching from a Russian nuclear
submarine.
October 8, 2005: A European Space
Agency CryoSat satellite breaks up in
flight after being launched on a converted ballistic missile.
14
15
16
17
18
19
October 15, 1929: The launch of a
rocket designed by Hermann Obert to
mark the Berlin premiere of Fritz Lang’s
Der Frau Im Mond fails to happen.
October 16, 1962: Radioactive fallout is
detected on Johnston Atoll after the
third attempt to launch a nuclear warhead using a Thor IRBM ends in it being
destroyed 156 seconds after launch.
22
23
24
25
26
October 23, 1995: A Conestoga rocket
with a mission payload explodes 45
seconds after blast-off from a NASA
facility in Virginia.
October 24 1960: A Soviet rocket
explodes during refuelling in Tyuratam,
killing126 engineers and ground crew.
30
31
October 13, 1964: Plans for an operating space station are cancelled after
President Brezhnez assumes control of
the Politburo, shutting down all projects
supported by predecessor Nikita
Khrushchev.
20
21
27
28
October 27, 2005: A Mozhayets-5
satellite launched on a Kosmos-3M
booster rocket from the Plesetsk
Cosmodrome fails to enter its planned
orbit.
October 28, 1999: A Russian Proton
rocket carrying a communications satellite crashes shortly after takeoff from
Baikonur.
29
October 10, 1984: The Russians use a
laser to track the Space Shuttle
Challenger, causing onboard equipment
failure and temporarily blinding its crew,
leading to a US diplomatic protest.
November
2008
1
2
November 1, 1962: Colonel Pyotr Dolgov is
found dead after a parachute jump from a
Volga capsule carried by balloon to an altitude
of 92,000 feet.
3
4
November 3, 1957: Russian mongrel Laika, the
first living creature in space, dies aboard
Sputnik II within hours of takeoff due to overheating and stress.
10
6
7
8
9
13
14
15
16
22
23
29
30
November 5, 1970: The guidance system
aboard UK test rocket Blue Streak fails, resulting in cancellation of the entire project.
11
November 10, 1961: An Atlas rocket with a
capsule containing a squirrel monkey is
destroyed at Cape Canaveral when the main
engine fails 15 seconds after launch.
17
5
12
November 12, 2002: Launched at the asteroid
Itokawa, the Minerva nano-lander misses its
target and vanishes into deep space.
18
19
November 14, 1961: Egypt refuses to confirm
that it has launched its first rocket while Dr.
Saenger of the Stuttgart Jet Propulsion Institute
denies Israeli accusations of involvement with
the United Arab Republic’s missile programme.
20
21
November 21, 1997: Satellite Spartan 201 is
released from Space Shuttle Columbia but fails
to function after the crew sends it the wrong
commands.
24
25
26
November 26,1959: Lunar probe Pioneer III
disintegrates forty-five seconds after launch
from Cape Canaveral when the protective
sheath covering the payload detaches prematurely.
27
28
November 28, 1963: Six days after John F
Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson
changes the name of America’s biggest launch
centre from Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy.
November 30, 1954: Ann Elizabeth Hodges
becomes the first person in history to be hit by
a meteorite when it crashes through the roof of
her Alabama home, badly bruising her arm and
leg and damaging her radiogram.
December 2008
1
2
December 1,
1994: An Ariane
rocket, carrying
a PanAmsat-3
telecommunications satellite,
crashes into the
Atlantic Ocean
shortly after
launch.
8
15
9
16
3
4
December 3,
1999: NASA’s
Mars Polar lander falls silent
after reaching its
destination and
is never heard
from again.
December 7,
1957: Sellorders for Glenn
L. Martin, the
company
responsible for
Vanguard’s firststage fuel tanks,
reach such volume that the
New York Stock
Exchange is
forced to suspend trading in
the stock.
10
11
17
18
5
6
7
December 6,
1957: Vanguard,
America’s first
attempt to place
a satellite in
orbit, ends badly
when the rocket
bursts into
flames, live on
national television, seconds
after ignition.
12
19
13
14
December 13,
1958: The
nosecone containing Gordo,
the first monkey
into space, disappears without
trace in the
South Atlantic
after its parachute fails.
December 14,
1972: Apollo
XVII, the last
manned mission
to the Moon,
starts its return
journey to Earth.
20
21
December 21,
1952: Followers
of psychic
Marian Keech
stand in the rain
singing
Christmas carols, being jeered
at by onlookers,
while waiting to
be whisked into
space by alien
spacecraft.
22
23
24
25
December 25,
2003: The
Beagle II lander
reaches Mars
on schedule but
fails to transmit
any signals back
to Earth.
29
30
31
December 31,
1943: The first
V2 rockets
delivered to
meet an end-ofyear deadline
are sent back
for further work.
26
27
28
December 28,
1989: Hermann
Obert, author of
By Rocket into
Planetary
Space, dies having never left
the planet.
Aleksandra Mir, First Woman on the Moon, produced by Casco Projects on location in Wijk aan Zee, NL, 1999.
Photography: Piotr Uklanski.
Gravity - The Eternal Countdown
In 1999 and in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the
original moon landing, I created a performance and land
art work on a beach in the Netherlands entitled First
Woman on the Moon. I wanted to beat JFK to his famous
quest of “bringing a man to the moon and safely back to
Earth before the end of the decade (the 60s)”, by putting
a woman on the moon before the end of the millennium,
knowing very well this wasn’t going to happen.
My woman only climbed a sand dune and proudly
planted her flag on its highest peak before the public was
welcome to join her in the fantasy and the sun went
down. Someone claimed to be “the first black man”,
another “the first child” or the “first German” on the
moon. The same evening, while the party still went on,
the landscape was flattened out again, leaving no
physical trace of the event behind, save the memories
and a story to tell future generations.
Since my woman never really went anywhere, she
never needed a rocket. But seven years later, in 2006,
the London based arts organization The Arts Catalyst,
which specializes in commissioning art that
experimentally and critically engages with science,
invited me to create a prologue to the story. They
commissioned, and helped build, the very spacecraft in
which The First Woman on the Moon surely could never
have gone anywhere: Gravity, a 22m high rocket made
out of solidly grounded junk.
The materials took five months to source from
various scrap yards in England. Most of it was steel or
fiberglass, plus a few tractor tires and several industrial
fans, and the bottom part was a discarded tank from a
toothpaste factory. Not counting the preliminary design
and welding, the rocket took two days of construction on
site, then stood erect for three days only and was
dismantled in another two. During this period, over 30
people worked on it, from the commissioners, engineers,
welders, transporters, riggers, light and stage crew and
documenters to myself. After the brief run, some loaned
parts were returned, and others sold off as scrap. So as
much as it was a very big sculpture, the rocket was also
just another fleeting event.
Thank You to everyone who took part.
Aleksandra Mir, London, December, 2007
Gravity was a new commission by The Art Catalyst, supported by Arts
Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation, and built for the show
Space Soon‚ at The Roundhouse, London, 9-13 September 2006.
Industrial Design & Fabrication - Cory Burr, C.Burr Design / Stratford
Welding, Engineering - Price Myers, Rigging - MTec Freight Group.
***
Gravity - The Eternal Countdown
Calendar 2008
Research and Space disaster chronology: Ken Hollings
Photography: Gillean Dickie, Marcus Leith, Andrew Dunkley
Design: Nick Stone
Printed by: Colour Digital Print, UK
Commissioned by The Arts Catalyst.