rocket-talk

[Werner Presber]

Zitat: “The literal “human” in “human flight” is the subject of a  
post at Ptak Science Books that calls attention to the visual  
similarities between two images of flying humans. The first is an  
engraving by Louis Peter Boitard from Robert Paltock's The Life and  
Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man, Relating Particularly,  
His Shipwreck near the South Pole; his Wonderful Passage thro a  
Subterraneous Cavern into a kind of New World, his there Meeting with  
a Gawry or Flying Woman (1750). It features a scantily-clad female  
figure, anything but demure, with a kite-like device harnessed to her  
back. Boitard’s engraving only alludes to flight, as our posed,  
Icarian Gawry stands with one hand pointing up, the other down,  
alluding to her role as a person mediating between earth and sky, yet  
all-too-rooted to terra firma. The technology depicted here is more  
accessory than airworthy. It appears a bit too small to support the  
Gawry’s frame. However, a closer look at Paltock’s text reveals  
something much more interesting. The kite-like device is literally  
clothing. A Gawry or Glumm (her male counterpart) wears a suit which,  
as depicted in Boitard’s other engravings, appear as a form-fitting  
leotard-like garment that extends to its kite form when arms and legs  
are outspread. Paltock even describes how, in a moment of curious  
gender-bending, the Glumm’s garment is comprised of stiff membranes  
and whalebone ribs—in other words, a corset. As objects of wonder,  
Gawries and Glumms levitate effortlessly in the pages of The Life and  
Adventures of Peter Wilkins, carrying cannons and even a seated  
figure into the skies. Yet this is an effortlessness made possible by  
technology that is unlike the ungainly or clunky artificial wings  
drawn by Leonardo da Vinci and others. This is, after all, clothing  
whose ability to follow closely the contours of the human body  
provides the appropriate shapes and cambers to form the kite-like  
extension.“

Zitat:“This image of Tsiolkovsky reinforces one of the central points  
of this post: A technology designed for escaping Earth’s atmosphere  
now becomes a device to help a person communicate. To borrow an  
argument made by the late Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, the  
hyperboloid rocket is prosthetic and aesthetic: it extends the  
capacity of the ear while reinforcing the spacecraft’s familiar form  
across different media.[5] Yet more needs to be said about the  
process of spaceflight and how it translates into a kind of  
communication. The idea of a rocket as a prosthetic, aesthetic, and  
finally, communicative device reaches a strange apotheosis in the  
last moments of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)—a  
description of a V2 rocket variant called Schwarzgerät, or Rocket  
0000, taking off to an unnamed target.

Aboard Rocket 00000 sits Gottfried, trained and conditioned to act as  
the rocket’s internal guidance system. “Guidance” is a misleading  
term, however, as our pilot/astronaut wears a form-fitting shroud  
made out of a mysterious plastic called Imipolex-G. Its purpose is to  
translate a human’s sensory inputs into polar coordinates. Gottfried  
has no means to actually talk to those on earth, much less the  
Schwarzgerät itself. There is no calculation, no communication, only  
pure reaction.“

found via 456: http://www.aggregat456.com/2011/09/rocket-talk.html

The life and adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish man ..: http:// 
www.archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00wilkgoog

ptak: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/04/ 
stylizing-a-sameness-in-flight.html