How do spacecraft achieve their form? Generally, they are little more than aggregations of related hierarchical engineering choices. Sometimes, a single decision becomes policy and guides all subsequent choices. Tangentially, what is the life of the spacecraft once its mission is complete? In its obsolescence, the spacecraft expands its mission into symbology, dreams, and ephemerality. Can we anticipate this transformation so that new infrastructure can live out its golden years with grace?

An architectural resolution
The degree project seeks to project a facility for the production of Hydrogen rocket fuel grown from algae. The facility’s slow harvest of Hydrogen coincides with the periodic return of Halley’s Comet; culminating in the launch of a scientific probe to study the comet and the solar system. Implicit in the facility’s programming is a cycle of growth, launch, and obsolescence.

Sited within the zone of exclusion, the Hydrogen production array, gasometer, Vertical Assembly Array cultivate and store Hydrogen rocket fuel, grown sustainably from massive hydrogen arrays, forming a mega-pavilion.

During most of the building’s life, the gasometer within the geodesic at the heart of the facility slowly collects and stores Hydrogen harvested from the array. However, as the perigee of Halley’s orbit brings it nearer to Earth, the Hydrogen in the gasometer is emptied into the rocket as fuel. Visitors to the array are at an apogee and the now irrelevant gasometer is converted to a planetarium.

As an analogy for architecture, the discourse about NASA and spacecraft is not esoteric. Thirty years on, we can see how the space race panned out; we can visit its artifacts in museums. Will architecture reach détente with its environment? Will its now state-of-the-art assemblages visited by our grandchildren, obsolete relics of a brave past?