Scientific/Engineering Colloquium
September 7, 2016, 3:30 p.m.
Building 3 Auditorium
RICK STERNBACH
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF ASTRONOMICAL ARTISTS
"Star Trek and
NASA: 50 Years of Inventing the Future Together"
Even before NASA and Star Trek
existed, filmmakers looked to the aeronautical industry,
organizations involved in rocket experiments, and astronomers to
aid them in depicting flights to other worlds. The Buck Rogers
and Flash Gordon serials treated audiences to journeys in
rocketships to meet up with those “new civilizations” we’re so
familiar with today, with both good and bad results. Movies such
as Frau im Mond and Things to Come primed us for more adventures
beyond the Earth with productions like Captain Video, Tom
Corbett, Destination Moon, Forbidden Planet, and countless
others. Art departments (with wildly varying budgets) designed
sets and props and spaceship models. The practice continued with
Star Trek, which first aired fifty years ago, and barely eight
years after NASA itself was formed. This presentation will
examine many of the concepts developed for Star Trek, both human
and alien, with particular emphasis on their scientific and
technological plausibility, even in the 24 century. Developments
in real launch vehicles, space stations, and distant planetary
spacecraft have all inspired the look of their future versions.
Research into new materials and processes, medicines, sensors,
computers, and energy systems have likewise driven the look of
future handheld equipment. While the real world has been quickly
catching up to what we have designed in the Star Trek universe,
we continue to learn and ask questions. And imagine.
About the Speaker:
Rick Sternbach has been a space and science
fiction artist since the early 1970s, with clients such as
NASA, Sky and Telescope, Smithsonian, The Planetary
Society, and Time-Life Books. He is a founding member and
Fellow of the International Association of Astronomical
Artists (IAAA). Rick added film and television work to his
repertoire with productions like Star Trek (ST): The
Motion Picture and Cosmos, for which his astronomical art
team received an Emmy award. Rick also twice received the
coveted Hugo award for best professional science fiction
artist. Rick was one of the first employees hired to
update the Trek universe for ST: The Next Generation. He
created new spacecraft, tricorders, phasers, and hundreds
of other props and set pieces. Rick later added Deep Space
Nine and Voyager to his spacecraft inventory, and kept his
hand in real space design with Voyager’s Ares IV Mars
orbiter. In 2004 Rick initiated Space Model Systems, which
is dedicated to providing unique model and art products to
the space science community. Physical terrains and globes
of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Iapetus were
produced for LA's Griffith Observatory; digital renderings
of the Cosmos 1 solar sail were done for the Planetary
Society; and a scale model of a proposed asteroid
retrieval spacecraft was built for the Keck Institute for
Space Studies. Most recently, Rick was included in the
special committee advising the National Air & Space
Museum on the restoration and conservation of the eleven
foot Starship U.S.S. Enterprise filming miniature.
For more about the
speaker:
http://www.siggraph.org/discover/news/spotlight-art-interview-star-trek-artist-rick-sternbach
Example art work:
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