“Flowers aren’t just beautiful to show on tables,” said Makoto Azuma, a 38-year-old artist based in Tokyo. His latest installation piece, if you could call it that, takes this statement to the extreme. Two botanical objects — “Shiki 1,” a Japanese white pine bonsai suspended from a metal frame, and an untitled arrangement of orchids, hydrangeas, lilies and irises, among other blossoms — were launched into the stratosphere on Tuesday in Black Rock Desert outside Gerlach, Nevada, a site made famous for its hosting of the annual Burning Man festival. “I wanted to see the movement and beauty of plants and flowers suspended in space,” Azuma explained that morning.
To accomplish this mission, titled Exobiotanica, Azuma and his 10-person crew teamed with Sacramento-based JP Aerospace — “America’s Other Space Program” — a volunteer-based organization that constructs and sends vessels into orbit. JP’s owner and founder, John Powell, started launching things into the upper atmosphere in 1977, when he was still a teenager. “The best thing about this project is that space is so foreign to most of us,” says Powell, “so seeing a familiar object like a bouquet of flowers flying above Earth domesticates space, and the idea of traveling into it.”
The expedition started in the dead of night, at 2 a.m. One hour later, Azuma was already building a bouquet with about 30 varieties of flowers. He started with an aerial plant tied to a six-rod axis and studiously added peace lilies, poppy seed pods, dahlias, hydrangeas, orchids, bromeliads and a meaty burgundy heliconia. “I am using brightly colored flowers from around the world so that they contrast against the darkness of space,” he said. The scent of the flowers was stronger and more concentrated in the dry desert breeze than in their humid, natural environments, and the launch site was redolent with their perfume. Azuma worked quietly, until the metal rods were covered completely with plants. Then he directed his attention to his bonsai. For this particular project, Azuma chose a 50-year-old pine from his collection of more than 100 specimens, and flew it over from Tokyo in a special box. While readying it for space, he kept it moist and removed a few brown needles with a tweezer.
Using Styrofoam and a very light metal frame, Powell and his volunteers had created two devices to attach the bonsai and the flowers, which would launch separately. JP’s volunteers and Azuma’s team worked to calibrate still cameras, donated by Fuji Film for this project, and six Go Pro video cameras tied in a ball that would record the trip into the stratosphere and back in 360 degrees. There were two different tracking systems on each device, one a Spot GPS tracker that would help locate the vessel once it fell down back to Earth, and the other that recorded altitude and distance traveled from the launch site. A radio transmitted the data to a computer array in a van. While the crew waited, a member of Azuma’s team took a red carnation, drilled a hole in a crack of the arid, sandy soil and planted it there. It was his nod to the huge red sun that had started to come up. The Exobiotanica team posed for photos. None of them had ever seen a landscape like this.
At 6:30 a.m., the first helium balloon that would launch Away 101, as JP Aerospace named the device, was ready, and the frame with the dangling bonsai was carefully brought to the launch site. Once it was attached to the vessel, Powell and his volunteers went through a final checklist, a cord was pulled and a giant balloon emerged from underneath a tarp. An hour and a half later, the flower bouquet, or Away 100, was off too. Both devices had roughly the same flight path. Away 101 went to 91,800 feet, traveling up for 100 minutes until the helium balloon burst. It fell for 40 minutes; two parachutes in baskets opened automatically when there was enough air in the atmosphere to soften impact. Away 100, which held the arrangement, made it up to 87,000 feet. Both devices were retrieved about five miles from the launch site. The bonsai and flowers, though, were never found.
After both pieces went up, Azuma embraced his team warmly and smiled. “I always wanted to travel to space,” he said. “This is a dream come true.”
An earlier version of this post erroneously swapped the artist's surname for his given name. He is Makoto Azuma, not Azuma Makoto.
