Raygun Gothic is a loose collective of artists and amateurs who built a 40-foot-tall, 7.5-ton, retro-styled, steel-and-aluminum rocket. It debuted at Burning Man, made an appearance earlier this year at the Maker Faire, and will soon be installed on San Francisco’s Embarcadero for a 14-month stay.
While we were at Maker Faire, we got an in-depth tour of the rocket from project manager and lead artist David Shulman. While it will be closed to visitors during its stay on in San Francisco, the rocket has an elaborate, three-level interior in which nearly every surface holds some kind of interest. There’s control equipment, scientific testing equipment, navigational devices, sensor readouts of various kinds, and even a shelf of books — all of them artful, if not particularly functional, spawn of someone’s artistic mind.
The sheer amount of labor required to build this thing is impressive in its own right. The aluminum skin was hand-rolled using English wheels, Shulman told us, and was fastened to the laser-cut steel frame with more than 3,000 rivets.
It’s all put together in a style that evokes the science-fiction pulp mags of the 1930s and 1940s. If we had actually gone into space during those decades, there’s no doubt our rockets would have looked like this.
The rocket is scheduled to land on the San Francisco waterfront in August.
For more on the rocket, including the crew’s retro-fantastic poster art, visit the Raygun Gothic website.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
See Also:
- Art, Madness and Electronics at Maker Faire 2010
- Video: Tesla-Powered Band Electrifies Maker Faire
- Maker Faire Preview: Animatronic Dragon Breathes 8-Foot Fireball
- Maker Faire: Still Life on Etch-a-Sketch
- Maker Faire Preview: Electronic Fireflies to Light Up Your Backyard
Full story at http://feeds.wired.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/LJ4ap2CLzJY/
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