Last night’s Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2007 party was amazing. The night was in honor of Yuri Gagarin, who in 1961 was the first person to travel to space and orbit the earth.
The event took place at the giant SOFIA Hanger 211 at the NASA Ames Research Center on Moffett Field in Mountain View. There were multiple art installations, including Michael Christian’s beautiful Hypha, 4 geodesic domes (Space Dome, Earth Dome, Documentary Dome & SQUID Labs), beautiful projections on a the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO) C-141A jet transport and a ton of other really cool stuff. Between the music, there many presentations, including a keynote by the first female private space explorer Anousheh Ansari and a great talk by NASA scientist Chris McKay about Mars exploration.
Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2007 was an interesting mixture of space travel expo, Burning Man and Maker Faire at a venue that would be hard to top. I really hope there do it there again next year.
Throughout the night, I keep thinking how amazing it was that we were celebrating the achievements a Cold War era Soviet cosmonaut at a high level NASA facility in the United States. Now that is progress.
Here’s more info on Yuri’s Night and Yuri’s Night Bay Area.
UPDATE 1: Here are more Yuri’s Night photos from Sam Coniglio, qDot, JasonUnbound & rmatei.
UPDATE 2: Daniel Terdiman did a story on Yuri’s Night for C|Net News.com: “Yuri’s Night: Burning Man meets NASA”
UPDATE 3: Wired used some of my Yuri’s Night photos as part of their coverage of the event.
UPDATE 4: Here are my photos of the special Yuri’s Night tour of NASA Ames Research Center.
UPDATE 5: GETV has posted their video of Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2007.
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thought about going to this, but then realized it was just a propaganda event for the Pentagon and NASA as they bid to weaponize space.
My Yuri’s night photos are up at http://tinyurl.com/2983j3
Hi Peter,
Actually the ‘Pentagon’ had nothing to do with our event and NASA was simply serving as our (gracious) hosts for this fine evening! As one of the event leads, let me iterate that our intentions were almost 180 degrees from what you’ve suggested. Yuri’s Night Bay Area was about bridging boundaries and insipiring unusual participation…
By the way, we’re collecting posts and photo sets like this on our website: http://www.worldspaceparty.com/postpress.php Please submit links!
watson
That space tourist lady is so, like, Deanna Troy or what?!
You want progress in space exploration? Ask Ms. Ansari if she’d like to be the next X-Prize! :-)
watson,
I totally agree. What was seen at NASA Ames this weekend was one prime example of what NASA SHOULD be.
Yuri’s Night is NOT an official NASA sponsored event, and only at one of NASA’s Labs out of 10 (that one lab being AMES) was there a large scale, officially sponsored party.
NASA Ames is going above and beyond the call of duty, independently supporting numerous worthy causes such as private aerospace, Yuri’s Night, NASA CoLab (the NASA lab in Second Life!), the Next Generation Explorers Conference, and more… Using intelligent partnerships like the recent ones with google.com to further the cause of space exploration, regardless of the attitude of the current administration.
Just wanted to add that I have Yuri’s Night photos up on Flickr as well. Also, I just posted a little article on Crave using a credited Laughing Squid photo.
NASA should try to hire 30-40 year olds for a change. The college students are too cynical about government agencies and they don’t learn enough to be cost effective.
and a couple more photos and a video of some of the light hooping
The photo of the space videos on the tailfin above the Ansari photo are of the Black Hole of Desire video installation by Mark McGothigan and Beverly Reiser featured at Yuri’s nite. The Website is beverlyreiser.com
We did the entire video environment behind the indoor airplane with 4 video projectors showing the swirly image behind the plane with the words. The yuri poster came from my living room. (of course One of the most unique events of the year. And we had a great time.
@randy:
perhaps you missed something. It was called the “Ansari X-Prize.” She (or her family) put up (most of) the money for it in the first place.
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