Author: Paul Dean / Source: The Next Web
NASA spent much of the 20th century commissioning painters and illustrators to imagine the future of space exploration. When Jeff Norris, the head of Mission Operations Innovation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), wanted a way to inspire a new generation of potential engineers, scientists, and astronauts, he turned to a modern alternative to those artists: a games developer.
“They were looking for an artist’s take,” explains Jeff Lydell, an executive producer at the Vancouver-based game studio Blackbird Interactive. “The theme of it was re-creating the art that Chesley Bonestell had generated for Wernher von Braun when they were trying to publicize the Apollo missions.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Bonestell’s paintings of distant worlds and the imagined technology used to explore them provided many people’s first real look into space. Published in magazines like Life and Collier’s, the illustrations helped feed a growing appetite for the space program, featuring imagery that was at least partly based on science fact.
Norris was a fan of Blackbird’s work on the critically acclaimed Homeworld science fiction strategy games, and he wondered if the company might be interested in taking a step closer to science fact — modeling the distant Mars in the not-so-distant future by using the same combination of technical and artistic creativity that the company’s designers had exhibited in developing their games. After speaking regularly with the Blackbird team, the project grew from mere passive imagery to what Lydell calls an “interactive kiosk”: not a complex and hyper-detailed simulation but an accessible, interactive, partly hypothetical vision that is nevertheless still backed up by topography, documentation, and mission plans from NASA.
The result, Project Eagle, shows a fully functional Mars colony in the year 2117. The settlement has been built up since the first NASA landing in 2034, and now more than five thousand people live, mine, and research on the Red Planet. Most of them are concentrated under a large domed superstructure, but there are also outlying algae farms, launchpads, and reactors. A click of a mouse gives data on each structure and its purpose, while an overlay reveals hidden subterranean infrastructure, including a well bored hundreds of meters down. Utility vehicles crisscross the landscape (such as Gale Crater, modeled using terrain data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter); a day-night cycle shows a distant sun casting a blue evening light (a best guess, based on photographic data); and a shuttle bound for Earth arcs off into the sky.
That shuttle, says Blackbird chief operating officer Eric Torin, is an artistic flourish, but it’s…
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