Articles to Read on Space Exploration and the Arts
On making the familiar unfamiliar.
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Other Editions | Articles to Read if You Are Generally Curious | What to Read After Watching ‘Adolescence’
Some time back, I came across this Note on Substack by
— and while I recommended Orbital by Samantha Harvey to them, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.The thinking turned into yearning — to read deeply on the intersection of arts and the cosmos — till I was cruising the internet for answers and questions.
(Note: I have been quite broad in my understanding of the crossover between space and the arts: while some writings below directly talk about the need for the humanities in tech, others present problems and solutions through the critical prowess accorded by the arts. Some are simply beautiful and generous musings in the quest for meaning at the intersection of hope and dread.)
The Stagnation of Physics
— Adrien De Sutter (Aeon, 2025)
Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics — a reality to unify all others.
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I argue that the pursuit of unity and dominance of a more fundamental reality presents itself not as physicists’ unique prerogative, but instead as an impossible burden placed on their shoulders by the modern world. I suggest that we should embrace a more pluralist and nuanced understanding of what comprises the cosmos, an understanding that not only accepts but invites criticism from other practices, disciplines and realities into its current predicament.
[…]
Whereas the natural sciences primarily seek to make the unfamiliar familiar, the critical humanities often operate from the opposite impulse — to make the familiar unfamiliar.
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[I]t is to take seriously those worlds that physics and modern realism have otherwise dismissed. That is, worlds in which, for instance, the Earth beings of Indigenous peoples are real, the ghosts of Japanese family members are cared for, and where God talks back to evangelical believers who speak with him.
The Next Frontier? Philosophy in Space.
— Joseph O Chapa (The New York Times, 2025)
I hesitate to tell NASA its business. But I think its requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences.
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But the need for STEM in space might be waning — just as the need for humanities and the social sciences waxes. After all, the “problems of flight” that once tethered us to this planet have largely been solved…
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Though Earth has been our only home, it may not be our home forever. What are the implications of that proposition? What might that mean for our conception of nationhood? Of community? Of ourselves and our place in the world? This would be the work of space philosophers.
The Folly of Mars
— Ken Kalfus (n+1, 2014)
For more than a century now, the fourth planet from the sun has drawn intense interest from those of us on the third… With increasingly intense longing, we’ve now begun to think of it as a newfound land that men and women can settle and colonize.
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Now that the Earth’s inevitable uninhabitability has become a staple of popular culture, we seem to have acquired the expectation that our species will save itself by moving to other planets.
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The urge to explore may be deeply engrained in human psychology, but space travel is a dream generated primarily by 20th-century science fiction and given form and durability, remarkably, by a single story-cycle within the genre… The governing metaphor, in our thinking about outer space, is that it extends across the universe like a terrestrial ocean, dangerous but traversable, islanded with many inhabited or inhabitable planets—a notion that disregards realities about vast interplanetary distances in favor of pleasing, elevating, self-mythologizing fantasies.
[…]
The fantasy of a future new life for the species allows us to shrug off climate change and other global challenges with the thought that if we fail to make this planet livable for the billions of people who inhabit it, another is promised for us somewhere else.
Capturing the Cosmos on Canvas
— Leonard David (Space.com, 2025)
For Ed Belbruno the universe around us is more than eye-catching. It's a medium for infinite fine art, an inspiration for artistic renderings that can break boundaries and be used for spacecraft missions to the moon and beyond.
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Belbruno in 1986 was working as a trajectory design engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California… The task was to find a trajectory to the moon for a small spacecraft released from NASA's space shuttle that used low thrust solar electric propulsion from Xenon ion engines.
Finding that trajectory was incredibly difficult, Belbruno said. "This is because the trajectory would have to carefully weave itself through the intermingling gravitational fields of the Earth and moon, like finding a needle in a haystack. It would involve using chaos theory," he added.
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"This may be the first time a painting was directly used to make a mathematical/scientific discovery," Belbruno said.
Afrofuturism Envisions Space in 2051
— Russell Contreras (‘Space 2051’, Axios, 2021)
Black science fiction writers and artists known as Afrofuturists say the next 30 years of space exploration could address legacies of racial terror on Earth if people of color join ventures and help reimagine human life among the planets.
Afrofuturists writer and artist Tim Fielder tells Axios that space has always represented liberation for Afrofuturists but the trauma from Earth will be carried into the stars if Black astronauts are subjected to the same racism by their fellow white space travelers.
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Afrofuturism describes an alternative place for Black people in space or a fantasy setting, or in relation to technology that allows one to escape slavery and discrimination.
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Literary News
Exciting literary news that I just found out about.
1. Penguin Announces Dazzling New Stories From Salman Rushdie
The Eleventh Hour is a moving, masterful collection of stories that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities. The book is slated for a global release on 4 November 2025…
2. Dolly Alderton to Write Pride and Prejudice Starring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden
Now, best-selling author Dolly Alderton and director Euros Lyn (Heartstopper) are set to bring Pride and Prejudice to the screen once again, in a brand-new six-part limited series. The adaptation will hew closely to the original text, reuniting existing fans with the timeless novel, while also introducing a new generation to Austen.