Valley Forge II

A lot of space for a spaceflight museum

In the course of the 3D reconstruction of the "Lost Exhibitions" quite a number of spacecraft, rocket and space artefact 3D models are created. Some I purchased, some are contributions by friends of the project, most were created from scratch.

So quite naturally the idea arose to collect all these models in a kind of mother of all space flight museums. In virtuality there's unlimited space for life-size exhibits after all.

Douglas Trumbull's 1972 science-fiction movie "Silent Running" held the iconic image of the last trees of earth being preserved aboard a fleet of starships. The last surviving ship, the Valley Forge, finally set its forest preserves adrift, giant cupolas holding the living memories of Earth's biosphere lovingly cared for by little robots.

«Silent Running»

(c) 1972 by Universal Pictures

This iconography created the idea of having kind of a "theme park", a memorial museum of space flight, created in a nostalgic futuristic space environment. I've already toyed around with the idea a bit, creating a km-wide space dome to accomodate space monuments, a "Rocket Alley" and lots of exhibition space to create a real spaceflight history exhibition.

The "lost exhibitions"

Yet another inspiration came from another 1972 science-fiction movie, Andrey Tarkovsky's "Solaris", based on the novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. At the conclusion of the movie the world-spanning living Solaris ocean created islands of materialized memories on its surface derived from memetic kernels it perceived in the minds of the human crew of the space station orbiting the planet. Kelvin the protagonist finds himself re-living scenes from his father's home on earth embedded in the most alien surrounding of the Solaris mind-ocean.

«Солярис» (Solaris)

(c) 1972 by Mosfilm

So I will strive to include the reconstructed "lost exhibitions" as "materialized memories" or, to give it a somewhat more mainstrem idea, as Star Trek like holodeck scenarios. Reconstructed space exhibitions as kind of add-on exhibits to the cosmic spaceflight memorial site ...

... work in progress ...

This project is in it's early stages. Obviously all this is quite a long term hobby and ongoing work in progress. As already explained on the About this Project page, this reconstrution project is a practice for me in-between "real" 3D visualization projects (and I have a daytime job too), so progress might be sporadic. Keep looking from time to time to follow how this website is growing ..