Art for Artemis
The next human spacecraft set for the Moon is NASA’s Orion spacecraft powered by ESA’s European Service Module. The Artemis programme is taking humankind to the Moon for sustainable exploration and Europe is going too. To celebrate the first mission this year and highlight how the Moon is important in human history ESA has teamed up with art and digital design schools to showcase new artists and their vision of lunar exploration.
As the only place that humans have seen with their own eyes throughout history, our Moon features heavily in world cultures. The Artemis programme, itself named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Moon, will take humans back to our natural satellite and, in doing so, will become memorialised in popular culture.
ESA has teamed up with eight art schools around Europe and challenged their students to produce art inspired by Artemis, lunar exploration and the European Service Module that will provide the power, propulsion, water and air for the astronauts on board.
Students made 22 artworks that we will showcase on the Orion blog over the coming months. Using a variety of techniques and from many different cultural backgrounds, the artists have thought about what human spaceflight to the Moon and beyond signifies.
All the artworks will be on display in Bremen, Germany, during the first Artemis mission that is set to launch this year.
A jury consisting of people from the art world, ESA and the industry that are building the European Service Modules will also select an artwork to grace the container that will ship the third European Service Module from the Airbus integration hall in Bremen, Germany to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.
The third European Service Module is being built right now and will be powering the flight that puts the first astronauts back on the Moon since the Apollo missions in the 1970s.
The schools that took part in Art for Artemis are: Les Beaux-arts de Paris in Paris, France, Kristiania in Oslo, Norway, UCM in Madrid, Spain, the Basel Art Institute in Basel, Switzerland, Media College in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Comics School in Turin, Italy, Hochschule Darmstadt in Darmstadt, Germany, and Forsbergs Skolan in Stockholm, Sweden.
Each of these schools represent the 10 countries in Europe that produced parts or supplied services to design and build the European Service Modules.
Follow ESA’s Orion blog where new individual artworks will be released each week with explanations from the artists, as well as details on where to view the art on location.
