Back in 1968, Norman Mailer compared wandering around the Kennedy Space Centre’s enormous Vehicle Assembly Building to being “in the back of the stage at an opera house”. Forty-five years later, Mailer’s strange vision was partially fulfilled when...

Back in 1968, Norman Mailer compared wandering around the Kennedy Space Centre’s enormous Vehicle Assembly Building to being “in the back of the stage at an opera house”. Forty-five years later, Mailer’s strange vision was partially fulfilled when the similarly proportioned NFAC Wind Tunnel at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre, test bed for Apollo and the space shuttle alike, became the backdrop for a performance of Ground Control, an opera, by the International Space Orchestra.

There have been operas about space before – Haydn’s Il Mondo della Luna featured a trip to the moon in 1777 – but none that have been written and performed by real astronauts and space scientists, working alongside international writers and composers, from Gorrillaz to Maywa Denki. “Of course now that she’s done it it’s obvious,” says science fiction author Bruce Sterling, who contributed lyrics to one of the opera’s arias, of the notion of a space opera by genuine space workers. “Before she did it, it was even more far-out than the domesticated living-room volcano she invented.”

Read my full Wired article on the International Space Orchestra.

[photo: Neil Berrett]

02/18/13 at 9:06am