I'm Not Yet a Geoselenic Artist After All

As you may or may not recall (it’s been several years now!), I took advantage of an opportunity in January 2021 to include a digital image of my painting Velocity on a shielded microSD card loaded onto the Peregrine lunar lander. I’m a space enthusiast who got a kick out of the idea that I’d have a digital artwork archive on the Moon as well as Earth, and other blog readers thought it was really cool as well; someone shared the news with the Sioux City Journal such that there ended up being local press coverage about it!

The Peregrine was initially supposed to go up in late 2021, but it was delayed for a variety of reasons including pandemic supply chain troubles. For a couple of years, the launch date just kept getting pushed back. Finally, at the beginning of this year, it was ready. On January 8th, 2024, the Peregrine was launched… but by January 18th, it had reentered Earth’s atmosphere, burned, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After months of investigation concluded, it turns out that a faulty valve was to blame.

As the “first contracted mission of NASA's commercial lunar payload program,” this was a rather sad conclusion which means that I am at present still just a terrestrial artist.

I'm A Geoselenic Artist!

An image of one of my paintings (Velocity, if you’re curious, as I went with my most recent work to date) is going to be sent to the Moon on a shielded microSD card in a 'Moonbox' from NASA contractor Astrobotic, so my work will be in a lunar digital archive! (Until radiation breaks through and wipes it away.)

A fellow space enthusiast who purchased a Moonbox to send microSD cards up and had extra storage available shared this opportunity with me (and others) and I excitedly submitted and was approved. I wanted to know what kind of exhibiting artist this will make me since international is no longer enough (and galactic seemed too broad), so I asked a bunch of friends and students what adjective means the Earth and Moon together.

There was a lot of speculation - interstellar also seems too broad, and the offerings of stratospheric, universal, lunatic (haha), and interplanetary didn’t fit the bill either. But my friend Bernie Langer came through with "geoselenic,” which is exactly the term I was looking for! (Apparently it’s of Hellenic derivation; Bernie also followed up with the Latin-derived “terralunar” which I like even better but which sadly hasn’t yet made it into a dictionary.)

Also, I can’t mention being a geoselenic artist without linking some relevant forefathers.