Andrew Liebchen Launch Agriculture
A point of departure In 1975, the engineered forms of the US Apollo module and the USSR Soyuz joined in a symbolic end of the space race and intergalactic détente. Imagine the cultural, political, scientific, and historical forces wrapped up in the moment when the hatch opens, and three American astronauts join their two cosmonaut colleagues. It is a moment of historical significance, taking place in a physical space that has been engineered for a specific purpose—safe and economical spaceflight— and not diplomatic relations. In the tight tube of an air
lock, representatives of two enemy people unite in a handshake, as their spacecraft have united in orbit. This occurrence is more frequent than not, the reuse of space beyond the intent of its design. The astronaut and the farmer Wheel charts are performative ephemera. Their stacked discs suggest dynamism, even when the chart’s information is fixed and predictable. In spite of infinite symmetry, the wheel chart requires a certain amount of asymmetry in order to function. The wheel 1
Andrew Liebchen Launch Agriculture
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The rocket scientist is also a missile designer, while the outer space mission planner must juggle schedules, orbital rhythms, and planetary cycles. It is a discipline the farmer, obsessed with the weather, the length of the day, and the phase of the moon, could appreciate. 2
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chart’s information may be rigorous and expansive; the junction of kitsch and tactility make the information digestible and portable. Wheel charts, like space craft themselves may be immutable; the ephemeral life they lead is not.
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(above left) A wheel chart describing the area of cultivation surface needed to produce hydrogen fuel from algae at various latitudes. (above right) This wheel relies on juxtaposition and obfuscation to subvert romanticism and linear narrative. At once, humanity’s oldest organized pursuit (farming) is place atop its newest (the crushing industry needed to fuel America’s consumer culture). (below) A diagram describes the parallel processes of preparing a payload for launch and the cultivation of hydrogen from the single-cell green algae C. Reinhardtii.
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(above) Exploded diagram of the hydrogen production array and the algae cultivation skin. Hydrogen fuel is stored in the gasometer hidden within a protective geodesic. The slide rule employed by the mission planner a more complex version of the wheel chart used by the farmer to time his heifer’s menstrual cycle. An architectural resolution The degree project seeks to project a facility for the 3
Andrew Liebchen Launch Agriculture
2009 production of Hydrogen rocket fuel grown from algae. The facility’s slow harvest of Hydrogen coincides with the periodic return of Halley’s Comet; culminating in the launch of a scientific probe to study the comet and the solar system. Implicit in the facility’s programming is a cycle of growth, launch, and obsolescence. Sited within the zone of exclusion, the Hydrogen production array, gasometer, Vertical Assembly Array cultivate and store Hydrogen rocket fuel, grown sustainably from massive hydrogen arrays. 4
2035
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(above) A life-cycle diagram of the launch facility. As Halley’s comet approaches in 2061, hydrogen fuel production stops, the gasometer is emptied into the waiting rocket, and the facility becomes a mega-pavillion for the once-in-a-lifetime launch. During most of the building’s life, the gasometer within the geodesic at the heart of the facility slowly collects and stores Hydrogen harvested from the array. However, as the perigee of Halley’s orbit brings it nearer to Earth, the Hydrogen in the gasometer is
emptied into the rocket as fuel. Visitors to the array are at an apogee and the now irrelevant gasometer is converted to a planetarium. Like the American and Soviet space programs, will architecture reach dĂŠtente with its environment? Thirty years on, we can see how the space race panned out; we can visit its artifacts in museums. Will its now stateof-the-art assemblages be visited by our grandchildren, becoming obsolete relics of a brave past? 5
Andrew Liebchen Launch Agriculture
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