launch / Credits

Lineage

The pedagogy is borrowed, the game is ours. What follows says which is which, and names the work launch ships with.

Pedagogy after NASA JPL’s “Marsbound! Mission to the Red Planet.”

The pedagogy

Marsbound! Mission to the Red Planet

NASA JPL. Borrowed, because it is method and not expression: the premise (design a Mars mission under hard limits, then fly it); goals set before design and ranked, with a record of what was dropped; criteria against constraints; the engineering design cycle; a constraint-and-accommodation reflection; ideas written before and after.

Carried over: nothing else. No cards, values, card text, mat, art, events or scoring. The launch mass and the propellant come out of the rocket equation, and the score comes out of a crew arrival review the lesson never had.

The rhetoric

McDonald’s Videogame

Molleindustria, 2006. Taken: procedural rhetoric, where the rules make the argument; four rooms running at once, three verbs each; crop rotation, now the seed vault bet; culling the sick, now blight scouting; the board’s pressure, now the Program Office. Turned: the four rooms run on light delay, so reflexes lose to rules written ahead, and the honest path is always viable, where theirs forced the dirty lever.

Mission audio

Courtesy of NASA

Includes public mission audio courtesy of NASA. No implied endorsement.

The Earth at night

NASA Earth Observatory, Black Marble 2016

The city lights under Waypoint’s fore window: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. No implied endorsement.

The Moon globe

NASA, the USGS and JPL

Surface colour from the LRO Camera wide-angle mosaic (NASA GSFC and Arizona State University) and relief from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (NASA GSFC), both by way of the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio CGI Moon Kit and the LOLA polar products. South pole sunlight, Earth visibility and permanent shadow from Mazarico et al. 2011, NASA Planetary Geodesy Data Archive. Names from the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, as adopted by the IAU. The Sun and Earth from JPL Horizons (DE441). Earth by day from NASA Blue Marble. No implied endorsement.

Type

Barlow, Barlow Condensed, JetBrains Mono

Barlow and Barlow Condensed, copyright 2017 The Barlow Project Authors; JetBrains Mono, copyright 2020 The JetBrains Mono Project Authors. Each under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: Barlow, Barlow Condensed, JetBrains Mono.

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