iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 2h

A personal Star Trek design, the USS Harmony, NCC-80000, Concord-Class. It's a diplomatic vessel built immediately after the Dominion War, tasked with putting the Alpha Quadrant back together and integrating Gamma Quadrant civilizations into the Federation. (Blender) Info below:

A Star Trek ship with a looping primary hull

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Space Shuttle descending (Made with Blender, background from NASA public domain)

The Space Shuttle against clouds and the atmospheric limb

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Don DeLillo: End Zone (1972) // Human Moments in World War III (1983)

Look, what would our cartoonists do if they wanted to satirize the Chinese, if we were in a period of extreme tension with the Chinese and the editorical cartoonists wanted to stir up a little patriotism? Would they draw slanted eyes and pigtails they way they drew buck teeth for the Japanese in the forties? No, no, they wouldn't make fun of the people at all. They'd satirize the machines, the nuclear capability, the weapons and such of the Chinese. They'd draw firecrackers and kites. War has always told me what they were capable of under stress. Now it informs the machines. It's the best test of a countrys technological skills. Are you gaseous diffusion plants going at top efficiency? Are your ICBM guidance and control mechanisms ready to work perfectly?

It is not too early in the war to discern nostalgic references to earlier wars. All wars refer back. Ships, planes, entire operations are named after ancient battles, simpler weapons, what we perceive as conflicts of nobler intent. This recon-interceptor is called Tomahawk II. When I sit at the firing panel I look at a photograph of Vollmer’s granddad when he was a young man in sagging khakis and a shallow helmet, standing in a bare field, a rifle strapped to his shoulder. This is a human moment, and it reminds me that war, among other things, is a form of longing.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Qian Xuesen's 1949 concept for a commercial spaceplane, designed to carry 10 passengers from New York to LA in 45 minutes. (Render made with Blender, backgrounds NASA public domain)

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

$Waechter produced a map of North America, pointed at a bay in Nunavut. “We’ve lost much of our radar coverage. We need to reinitialize it. There’s an old DEW line radar base that was abandoned in the Cold War drawdown, we need it up and running to win this war. CAM-3. Should be power still there, the weather service was using it as an automated station.” He handed over a photograph. A long shed. The brilliant white radome of the primary search radar. The Cold War, she thought, wasn’t this supposed to happen then? With a lurch she realized she had been sleep walking; had been targeted from the cradle onwards. She had always been in danger, her teachers just forgot to tell her. They talked about nukes in history class. Basic’s radiation training had felt perfunctory. “This war? Sir?” It seemed like an absurd word to use. Did they actually have a name for this? Consensual annihilation, maybe. Waechter was not amused, “Yes Lieutenant, this war. Now, if you don’t mind keeping your questions confined to the realm of mission relevance, please.” She reached down to the map and used her finger as a scale marker to estimate the straightline distance from Grand Forks to CAM-3. The ceiling vibrated. Dust fell. “That’s something like fourteen hundred miles.” The lights flickered again. Throughout the world the computers were following their software logic, finding targets, dispersing weapons, watching for results and doing that again and again and again. Abstraction had built the system; a technofractal of decentralized decisions that had combined to form an edifice of death that was falling—now, finally, irreconcilably, with mathematical precision—onto the human race, or the end thereof.$

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The Integrated Interplanetary Vehicle, my design for an alternate history joint US-Soviet vehicle for exploring Mars (first picture) and Venus (second picture). Renders made with Blender (Edited NASA public domain images for the backgrounds)

A realistic 70s spaceship over the Mars limb

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Integrated Interplanetary Vehicle (IIV), my own design for a Cold War era joint Soviet-US spacecraft. NASA would be in charge of the NERVA rockets, transfer capsule, and S-IVB workshop, the Soviets would be in charge of the other crew accommodations and scientific systems. (Made with Blender)

A spaceship with four rocket stages and space station-esque modules sticking out the front.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

You'd hope the NASA administrator would understand the difference between Congress funding his administration and him personally donating $3 million to a super-PAC supporting his boss.

You'd think running America's space program would be a position above politics.

@rookisaacman
, however, has given $3 million to MAGA, Inc. since being confirmed as NASA administrator.

This isn't illegal, experts tell me. But is it right?

Jared's response: Not sure what you mean by America’s space program being above politics. Leadership has been politically appointed since inception, national space policy is established by the executive branch, oversight and funding come from Congress, and industry lobbies everyone extensively. I would say it has always been very political, and if you love America’s space program, being politically savvy is an asset. I have also donated $30 million to charity this year, which is also not illegal.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Tongren space station, my design for a joint US-Chinese lunar orbiting station, roughly based on Hexagram 13 of the I Ching. (Renders made with Blender)

A cylindrical space station with moon behind it.

A three module space station with a Mengzhou and Orion attached to it.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Fluidic Lens Telescope: my design for a near future astronomical station based on the symbol for Earth, showing off some of the cool reflective geometry. The lens would be, as the name suggests, formed from a liquid. (Renders made with Blender)

A reflective telescope with trusses extending out of it and reflecting back on the lens.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I take this bit about the Eisenhower era as being one of the main themes of The Counterforce section of Gravity's Rainbow. Then the next paragraph one of the main themes of Bleeding Edge.

"For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with . . . Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California, We lost touch."

"Maybe he didn't work in the blowing-up-the-world department."

"I know, I'm a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there...

...it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives."

"Pop."

"Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid."

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A great thing about Bleeding Edge is seeing Pynchon reference 90s - early 2000s pop culture. It breaks my brain a little bit to imagine him watching The Phantom Menace.

"Let me buy you a cup of coffee or something."

"Better yet there's a bar right down the street's still got Zima on tap."

Maxine gives her a look.

"Where's your nostalgia, man, Zima's the bitch drink of the nineties, come on, I'm buyin the first round."

Fabian's Bit Bucket dates from the early days of the dotcom boom. The girl behind the bar waves at Driscoll when she and Maxine come in and reaches for the Zima tap. They are soon settled into a booth behind a couple oversize schooners of the once wildly popular novelty beverage. At the moment nothing much is happening, though happy hour looms, and with it the onset of another impromptu pink-slip party, for which the Bucket has begun to get a reputation.

The Singhs are up on the tenth floor, the elevators are all either busy or broken down from overloading, and Maxine, having heard fitness-benefit rumors, is OK with taking the stairs. The somber old landmark is certainly jumping tonight. Stairwells and corridors are thronged with all manner of pint-size Statues of Liberty, Uncle Sams, firefolks, cops and GIs in fatigues, not to mention Shreks, Bob the Builders, SpongeBobs and Patricks and Sandy the Squirrels, Queen Amidalas, Harry Potter characters in Quidditch goggles, Gryffindor robes, and witch hats. Apartment doors are all wide open, and inside you can hear a range of sound

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My favorite new reads from the Summer - Close Range - Annie Proulx - On the Calculation of Volume 1 - Solvej Balle - Moderan - David R. Bunch - Uncertain Empire - Edited by Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell

Uncertain Empire - Edited by Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

FLT (Fluidic Lens Telescope), my design for a near-future crewed astronomical station, based on the astrological symbol for Earth. The lens is a bowl of fluid held together by surface tension. Some more details below. (Render made with Blender, NASA public domain backgrounds.)

A spacecraft that is like a big bowl with a camera pod sticking out. And it has a cylindrical habitation module.

A bowl of fluid reflecting space and floating over the Earth

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"Second comes right after first." - Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin guest staring in The Simpsons saying "Second comes right after first."

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Renders of Apollo Missions: 5, 9, any mission's Loss of Signal, 13 (Renders made with Blender, Earth background in 5 and 9 from NASA public domain)

An Apollo CSM and LM separated and in Earth orbit.

An Apollo CSM/ LM stack slipping behind the moon.

Apollo 13, the full stack plus a bunch of debris around it following the explosion.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The KH-11 is the current generation of NRO spy satellites. They are heavily classified. Sightings and descriptions show that it is relatively similar to the Hubble Space Telescope. It just points at Earth. (Render, Blender. Background NASA public domain)

A satellite that looks like the Hubble Space Telescope point towards the Earth, which is above it.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

An Apollo CSM awaiting its Lunar Module. (Render made with Blender)

An Apollo CSM over the moon with the Earth in the background.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Pynchon reaching for a way to explain the complicated web of post-war politics:

"Slothrop’s first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself . . . that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston’s—

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

My favorite Pynchon joke, cracks me up every time.

4 The Counterforce What? - Richard Nixon

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Incidental minimalism in astronaut photography (NASA public domain images)

The atmospheric limb (blue) with a sunburst against the deep black of space

A tunnel in a spacecraft, it's mostly white with two yellow stripes.

The end of the Space Shuttle in which the outline is glowing in orange.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A picture of the film recovery, from Wikipedia:

A C-130 with a hook catching a parachute.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

KH-8 Gambit 3, a series of National Reconnaissance Office spy satellites operated from 1966 to 1984. Its film canisters were dropped from space and picked up in mid-air by modified cargo planes. (Renders made with Blender, backgrounds NASA public domain)

A pencil-like satellite over blue waters

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

KH-11 KENNEN, a classified NRO satellite type. There are only a few descriptions and a handful of lo-fi pictures, so this is my extrapolation of what the earlier Blocks might look like. (Render, made with Blender.)

A gold satellite that kinda looks like Hubble.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Gravity's Rainbow might be the only major novel that just expects you to know a little bit of calculus and rocket design.

As some gamblers on the stock market know when to place stop orders, feeling by instinct not the printed numbers but the rates of change, knowing from first and second derivatives in their skin when to come in, stay or go, so there are engineering reflexes tuned always to know, at any moment, what, given the resources, can be embodied in working hardware—what is "feasible." On the day that a 2000 m/sec exhaust became feasible, the A4 itself suddenly came in reach.

suddenly came in reach. The danger then lay in being seduced by ap-
proaches that were too sophisticated. No one was immune. Hardly a
designer there, including Pökler, didn't come up with at least one
monster rig, some Gorgon's head writhing with pipes, tubes, compli-
cated folderol for controlling pressures, solenoids on top of pilot
valves on auxiliary valves on backup valves—hundreds of pages on
valve nomenclature were printed as appendices to these weird propos-
als, all promising huge pressure differences between the inside of the
chamber and the nozzle exit—beautiful, as long as you didn't care
much about those millions of moving parts behaving together too re-
liably. But to get a dependable working motor, one the military could
use in the field to kill people, the real engineering problem now was to
keep things as simple as possible.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

My designs for interplanetary spaceships based on the symbol of their destination: Mars ♂, Mercury ☿, Venus ♀, the sun ☉

A spaceship with big metal petals and a torus, it looks like the symbol for Mars

A spaceship with cruciform radiators and a big torus with magnetic field generators at the front.

A spaceship with a big ring and a tethered space station

A spaceship that has a torus and a big heat shield protecting it.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Some of my favorite parts of the Apollo transcripts are when the boys get a little silly with it.

177:37:46 Young (LM onboard): You look right on to me. My optical sight is coming right into your docking window.
177:38:05 Young (LM onboard): Don't hit my arm, Charlie.
177:38:07 Duke (LM onboard): I'm sorry.
177:38:08 Young (LM onboard): [Garble.]
177:38:35 Young (LM onboard): How would you like to do a EVA transfer?
177:38:39 Duke (LM onboard): How would you like a kick in the behind?
177:38:42 Young (LM onboard): Hot mike to Houston. [Laughter.]
177:38:48 Duke (LM onboard): No, we're normal voice. But we got our tape recorder running. [Laughter.]
end of LM transcript for mission.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

KH-11 KENNEN Block IV, a highly classified NRO spy satellite. (Render made in Blender)

A tubelike satellite flying over a snowy landscape.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

KH-11 KENNEN Block IV, one of the 21st century versions of the highly classified KH-11 spy satellite operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. (Rendered in Blender)

A reflective satellite with a big optical tube floating in space.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

KH-11 KENNEN, a highly classified type of NRO spy satellite currently in operation. We have no pictures of it, so I thought I'd take a swing at a conceptual render, based on the general description of it being like stubby Hubble Space Telescope.

A space satellite similar to Hubble, but it's gold.

A space satellite that looks like Hubble

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The Petrel, an interstellar survey vessel from my short story "Skipping Ahead", during the four phases of its mission: Earth departure, interstellar cruise, in orbit over Gliese 667 Cc, and returning to a changed Earth. Technical details and link to the story below.

A white cylindrical spacecraft over the Earth.

A spacecraft in interstellar space, with glowing engines that look like two parenthesis.

A cylindrical spacecraft in orange and red light

A cylindrical spacecraft with Earth in the background

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I very much like the Slothrop-in-Mittelwerk episode

The wall-paintings lose their intended primitive crudeness and take on primitive spatiality, depth and brilliance—transform, indeed, to dioramas on the theme "The Promise of Space Travel." Lit sharply by carbide light which hisses and smells like the bad breath of someone quite familiar to you, the view commands your stare. After a few minutes it becomes possible to make out actual movement down there, even at the immense distances implied by the scale: yes, we're hanging now down the last limb of our trajectory in to the Raketen-Stadt, a difficult night of magnetic storm behind us, eddy currents still shimmering through all our steel like raindrops that cling to vehicle windows . . . yes, it is a City: vegetable "Ho-ly!"s and "Isn't that something!"s go away echoing as we crowd about the bloom of window in this salt underground. . . .

Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official vision at all—that's for the ribbon clerks back on the Tour, in the numbered Stollen. No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of Immachination)—but tourists have to connect the look of it back to things they remember from their times and planet—back to the wine bottle smashed in the basin, the bristlecone pines outracing Death for millennia, concrete roads abandoned years ago, hairdos of the late 1930s, indole molecules, especially polymerized indoles, as in Imipolex G—

Wait—which one of them was thinking that? Monitors, get a fix on it, hurry up—

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Double integral symbolism in Gravity's Rainbow

$All right. But Etzel Ölsch's genius was to be fatally receptive to imagery associated with the Rocket. In the static space of the architect, he might've used a double integral now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations were known—masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it's been years since he's had to do with anything that basic. Most of his calculating these days is with marks and pfennigs, not functions of idealistic r and $\theta$, naïve x and y. . . . But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled. . . . "Meters per second" will integrate to "meters." The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.$

As the pendulum was pushed off center by the acceleration of launch, current would flow—the more acceleration, the more flow. So the Rocket, on its own side of the flight, sensed acceleration first. Men, tracking it, sensed position or distance first. To get to distance from acceleration, the Rocket had to integrate twice—needed a moving coil, transformers, electrolytic cell, bridge of diodes, one tetrode (an extra grid to screen away capacitive coupling inside the tube), an elaborate dance of design precautions to get to what human eyes saw first of all—the distance along the flight path.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Took some pictures of the partially-abandoned North Truro Air Force Station on Cape Cod.

An abandoned area with the radome in the distance.

A mural of the world on a beat up building.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Skylab, America's first space station.

Skylab over the Earth with the moon in the distance.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire (1974)

It is true that they do use rocket engines and have boosted missiles, but probably launch vehicle is the most accurate label to pin on these huge slim cylinders we have all seen rising majestically up our television screens. They are mostly empty after their fuel burns out, but historically they are of supreme importance because without them there would be no space age. Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Von Braun—these chaps never dreamed about simulators or recovery systems or mission planning, but about the raw rocket power which would be required to put men into orbit, onto the moon, out beyond Jupiter, or wherever. In my own view, the pendulum has swung; rockets are about as interesting as the powder which propels a bullet. To be fascinated by them is to prove McLuhan’s point that the medium is the message, or perhaps it is a more Freudian thing.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I love the way Pynchon first introduces the V2.

Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb.

"Incoming mail." Did he whisper that, or only think it? He tightens the ragged belt of his robe. Well, the range of these things is supposed to be over 200 miles. You can't see a vapor trail 200 miles, now, can you.

Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth, farther east, the sun over there, just risen over in Holland, is striking the rocket's exhaust, drops and crystals, making them blaze clear across the sea. . . .

The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cutoff, end of burning, what's their word . . . Brennschluss. We don't have one. Or else it's classified. The bottom of the line, the original star, has already begun to vanish in red daybreak. But the rocket will be here before Pirate sees the sun rise.

The trail, smudged, slightly torn in two or three directions, hangs in the sky. Already the rocket, gone pure ballistic, has risen higher. But invisible now.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Nocturne Magazine nominated my story "You Who Dwell in the Dust" for Best of the Net. If you haven't, check it out. (Link below) It's about a near-future Mars mission and the isolation physical hardship the first colonists would have to survive, in contrast to the current corporate advertising.

A picture of the Mars sky highlighting Earth with the caption "You are here"

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

A secondary mission profile, as implied by the class name, is high-speed reconnaissance. A powerful sensor suite occupies much of forward part of the primary hull. Unlike the Defiant, the Oxcart-class is not a tough little ship, and relies on speed to stay alive.

A Star Trek ship with an integrated secondary hull and a very elongated primary hull. It has three warp nacelles.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

A personal #startrek design: the USS Corvid, Oxcart-class light attack cruiser. Designed during the Dominion War, it is optimized to get as close to Warp 10 as possible to quickly respond to Dominion attacks. It is roughly Defiant sized (a little bigger, though). #ds9

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The landers: American MEM on the left, Soviet MPK on the right.

A mirrored lander exiting a cylindrical hull

A lander pulling away from a cylindrical spaceship

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

An infographic comparing two Cold War concepts for a crewed Mars mission: the American IMIS and the Soviet MEK. Skylab for scale.

IMIS Country: USA Crew: 6 Engines: 5 x NERVA stages Mission Time: 460 Days Length: 582 ft Stage Diameter: 32 ft Mass 2.7 million lbs. MEK Country: USSR Crew: 3-6 Engine: Nuclear Electric Mission Time: 630 Days Length: 574 ft Diameter 55ft Mass 330,000 lbs Skylab Country: USA Crew: 3 Engine: N/A Days in Orbit 2249 Days Length w/o Apollo CSM: 82 ft Diameter: 21 ft Mass: 168,000 lbs Cold War Mars Concepts

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