Imagining and making real
The USA is a strange place. On the surface, it seems so similar to the UK, and the history of the two countries has been frequently intertwined - both for good, and for bad. However, the sheer scale of America is the thing that always makes me realise the difference whenever I visit - it feels more like going to a collection of small countries than one huge nation, each state as different from the next as Britain is from the USA as a whole. Despite this scale, or perhaps because of it, the country seems to bind together in pride of their nation, in a way that the UK simply does not. It comes across a lot in every day life, and much of it is hard to grasp as someone from another part of the world.
Why do I mention this? Well, on the subject of scale and patriotism, it's difficult to consider a better metaphor for them than the US space programme. I recently spent a day at Kennedy Space Center in Florida - the first time I've been there since I was a child. Visiting as an adult, it's an entirely different experience than that of a kid, who despite being impressed by rockets, was a little miffed at being dragged down to the coast at the expense of a day's mouse-bothering at Disney World.
The scale of the Center, like the country itself, is one of the most impressive aspects; towering space craft, the vast amounts of money involved, the number of people involved in the operation. That said, the most impressive thing, by a long way, is the scale of the ambition and achievement that you see. As you walk through the exhibits, wander around the craft involved in the exploration of space, and peer into the history of the subject, you constantly feel dwarfed by everything around you - it's a real shiver-up-the-spine environment, and relentlessly epic. The memorial dedicated to those who have died in US space programmes (a towering, black marble wall with the names of the 24 astronauts who have lost their lives) is a surreal and humbling reminder of those who chose to go into space, and have surrendered their lives as a result, while running your fingers across the atmosphere-scarred heat shield of a Gemini command module, recovered after being dragged by gravity back to Earth, is difficult to put in context.
And that's the thing that really, really gets me - much of space flight has been fuelled by relentless ambition in achieving what is difficult to even imagine. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy stated: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Everywhere at Kennedy Space Center, you see the legacy of a ridiculous suggestion that despite never even having sent a man into orbit, the goal was set to put one on the surface of another planet. And the US did it in less than seven years.
Ultimately, the Center, and everything within, is symbolic of something that we are losing, or in some cases, never had. The ability to think of these outlandish, fantastical ideas, and not to scoff, or deem them impractical or prohibitively complex is vital if we are to progress as a society - playing safe ensures the survival of what is current and existing, but strangles evolution. In an era of austerity, we risk grinding to a halt.
This strange country, with all its flaws and differences, and with a patriotic urge that generally goes over the heads of many in the UK, is something I can entirely comprehend and appreciate, when you consider the $136 billion, 400,000+ employees, and the most complex machine ever assembled that sent 12 men to the moon. It is brilliant, and it is inspiring, and for me, shows the power of an idea, and what can happen when people get behind it and believe in a massive way.
And as a designer, I fucking love that.
