Students' contest-winning pen, paint and poetry works shown aboard International Space Station
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
A worldwide contest has again redefined the concept of "high art" by briefly converting the International Space Station (ISS) into a gallery for the winners' works.
The space station's Cupola, which is usually lit by the colors of Earth shining through the module's large, panoramic windows, recently took on a different palette as printouts of paintings, ink drawings and poetry blanketed its panes. The art, which was created by students and educators from the United States, Taiwan, Chile and the Philippines, depicted what it is like to live and work in space.
"For the second year in a row, the International Space Art and Poetry Contest has reignited my love for space beyond my wildest imagination. Bright minds from 35 countries around the world showcased wide-eyed curiosity, bright color and aspirational words," said John Shoffner, a private astronaut who first stablished the competition as part of his Axiom-2 (Ax-2) mission to the space station in 2023.
In 2024, Stoffner's Perseid Foundation received more than 2,700 entries from which he and a panel of judges — including record-setting astronaut and Ax-2 commander Peggy Whitson — selected four works of art and four poems. NASA then uploaded digital copies of the pieces to the orbiting laboratory, where the station's crew printed them out, hung them in the Cupola and photographed each.
Related: International Space Station: Everything you need to know about the orbital laboratory
Among the winners was eight-year-old Lillian Eom of Chandler, Arizona, whose ink drawing was of a girl and a puppy, both in spacesuits, floating with an alien amongst a spacescape framed by rainbows and filled with multi-color stars and planets. Thad Mccauley, an art instructor from Aurora, Colorado, also won for his digital depiction of an astronaut on a rocket-powered board.
Among the winning poets was Gabriel Lanehart, an 8-year-old student from Spring, Texas, whose piece "In Space" began "Living in space would be like a race, but our science would have to keep up the pace...". Therese Fait Bayaton, an 18-year-old from the Philippines, titled her winning verse "Celestial Revue."
"To float, unfettered by gravity's pull, Adrift in that ethereal, boundless lull, To witness the universe from a vantage so rare, A perspective both alien and beyond compare," Bayaton wrote.
Related stories:
— 3D-printed 'Laugh' Is 1st major artwork to be made in space
— SpaceX's Ax-2 mission for Axiom Space in photos (gallery)
— Private Ax-2 astronaut releasing free educational videos filmed in space today
Other winners included 11-year-old Pedro Martin from Chile, 12-year-old Chiu Le Lee from Taiwan, 18-year-old Nadia Farmer from the U.S. and educator Kathleen Jakobsen. All eight will receive their station-printed work — which returned to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in December — and a certificate stating their art was flown in space.
Every student who entered the contest received a digital participation certificate, their artwork posted to the contest's website and a note from Shoffner.
"Thank you, once again, for showing me the sky is not the limit," he wrote.
Sponsored by the ISS National Laboratory, the International Space Art and Poetry Contest is made possible with the help of Axiom Space and the Limitless Space Institute. The competition is one way the ISS National Lab is used to engage youth across the planet to spark their interest in space and StEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)-focused careers.
Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on X at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2025 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
41 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Inside Allee Willis' fabulously kitsch party house that inspired a pop-up book
When you walk into Willis Wonderland, your eye doesn't know where to land. The North Hollywood house, which songwriter Allee Willis first purchased in 1980 and turned into a living ode to all things kitsch, is awash in trinkets and tchotchkes. But also in coveted art pieces and stylish furnishings. The living room alone features a lavender Plycraft chair and a Sputnik chandelier as well as a Weltron Space Ball Retro stereo boasting an Earth, Wind & Fire 8-Track and a 'Sock It To Me' squished beer ashtray. It's all just the way Willis had it before she died in 2019 at 72. And now, for those who have always wished they could tour this most fabulous of L.A. houses where everyone from Lily Tomlin, Paul Reubens and Cassandra Peterson once partied, comes a new pop-up book that brings it into your own, likely less fantastical, home. 'Willis Wonderland: The Legendary House of Atomic Kitsch' was written by Willis' friend Hillary Carlip and Trudi Roth, designed by Carlip, illustrated by Neal McCullough and paper-engineered by Mike Malkovas. And, like the house it hopes to capture and mythologize in equal measure, the pop-up book is a celebration of Willis' own 'more is more' sensibility. 'When you walk in, it's full of surprises,' Carlip tells me as we walk around the house on a sunny Friday morning and admire the Jason Mecier portrait of Willis made of trash trinkets. 'You keep finding new things. I've been here hundreds of times, and I saw something today I hadn't seen before. I wanted to do that with the pop-up book. To have easter eggs and things where you pull and spin and open and that kind of thing. I just think the interactivity, where you really immerse yourself in it, is really important now, especially since so much is digital.' The tactility of the book encourages you to explore every nook and cranny of the house, which does already feel like a museum of sorts. Of kitsch, perhaps, but also of Willis herself. The more you get to learn both about this well-kept building (once rumored to be an MGM party house), you also learn more about Willis' extraordinary career. Willis is perhaps best known as the songwriter behind such hits as Earth, Wind & Fire's 'September' and 'Boogie Wonderland.' But over her four-decade career, she also co-wrote the songs for Broadway musical 'The Color Purple'; penned a Grammy-winning tune for 'Beverly Hills Cop'; and worked with acts as varied as the Pet Shop Boys, Dusty Springfield, Patti LaBelle, Cyndi Lauper and Taylor Dayne. But she was also a visual artist, a designer, a sculptor and an avid collector. With her signature asymmetrical haircut, her loud, fashionable outfits and a penchant for all things off-kilter, the Detroit-born artist made little distinction between her work and her life. It makes sense her abode, a pink William Kesling single-family house (one of only 15 built in the Los Angeles area in the 1930s) dotted with bowling balls and palm trees, would serve as a continuation of her wild, wondrous aesthetic. When Willis died, the question of what to do with her Willis Wonderland was entangled with how to further cement her legacy. Her partner, animator and producer Prudence Fenton, knew the famed house would need to be cared for. And, perhaps more importantly, memorialized. When Fenton and Vincent Beggs — the executive director of the Willis Wonderland Foundation, launched in 2022 — came up with the idea of a book about the house, they knew it couldn't be just any kind of book. They toyed with a sleek coffee table book with gorgeous photos of the house. But that would've been too sterile. Too staid. Willis, they knew, deserved something bolder. The pop-up book offers as immersive a tour of the house as you can dream of. The scene at the so-called 'kitsch-en,' for instance, wonderfully captures Willis' commitment to playfulness as a central design conceit — something all too rare in a world often dressed in basic neutrals. A pink-leather dinette anchors a space that's all but drowning in tiki mugs, salt and pepper shakers and adorned with artworks (including a collection of Zel caricatures). Willis' humor is clearly prevalent throughout. That's nowhere more obvious than in her 'Rec Room.' A blue-hued linoleum floor made to look like an aquarium, replete with singing fish and turtles, brightens the dark-wooded downstairs space and echoes the nautical elements Kesling introduced into his Streamline Moderne homes. Here, this underwater space serves as a repository for 'Allee's Legendary Landfill of Esthetic Essentials.' The shelves, as the book shows, are filled to the brim with collectibles, many of them part of the collection of Black culture, which her friend James Brown first helped her curate. Lunchboxes, magazines, records, action figures and sculptures all but beg you to spend hours upon hours examining each and every one of them. This is thrifting as cultural history. Kitsch as historical remembrance. In Carlip's pop-up version of this room, you can see, among many other things, a crowned Miss America Vanessa Williams Corn Flakes box, a slew of Afro picks ready for the taking, a Harlem Globetrotters coloring book, a Diana Ross doll and a Chubby Checker Twister game. 'It's a funny thing, because Mike, the paper engineer, who's done many other books and clients and everything, kept saying, 'You can't have so much detail. You have to edit,'' Carlip shares. 'And I was like, 'Nope.' I just stood my ground. I was like, 'It's Allee. It's all got to be in there.' But then I finally relented and said, 'How about there's a downloadable poster where people can get descriptions of items and see them up close?'' In that poster, you can see 'Libby the Lovely Liberated Lady' doll, a Women's Liberation toy that's as hilarious as she sounds (you're encouraged to pull her skirt for a surprise). And you can also see a photo of the famed Riverside Market sign that adorns the house's outdoor pool next to a portable bar Willis had hand-sculpted from Motor City-found items. As the future of the house as it stands remains up in the air, with Carlip unsure what the Foundation has planned for it, the pop-up book (like last year's 'The World According To Allee Willis' documentary) hopes to make sure Willis' artistry is preserved in ways she would most enjoy. 'I just think it really captures her whimsy, her thoughtfulness, her creativity and the joy,' Carlip adds, about the house and book alike. 'Everything she created had so much joy in it. I think when people come into this house, they feel all those things, they're inspired to create. I think just the breadth of her creativity is infectious. You cannot help but be inspired by being in here.' Carlip points to a painting that sits atop the fireplace right above a Sascha Brastoff gold ceramic bull. The piece features a blue-hued woman whose irregular features (bold neon lips, perky colorful nipples) are intentionally meant to evoke a certain famed artist. It is signed 'P. Picasso.' 'People would always ask her, 'Is this …?'' Carlip recalls with a laugh. 'It's not. I mean, it's called 'Girl with Blue Period.''
Los Angeles Times
42 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, 'NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on 'practical, quantitative,' even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: 'America will always be the first in space,' he said during his first term. 'We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led.' Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that 'the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that.' Among the 'foreign class of servants,' whom Vance acknowledged included 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. 'Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles,' Dreier observes. In this White House, however, 'there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency.' A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a 'hoax.' He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its 'misguided ... Global Climate Change programs,' and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is 'very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do' in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. 'Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money,' Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but 'I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates,' Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. 'You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space,' he told me. 'It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes.'
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
Axiom's CEO explains to us what a $70 million ticket to space gets you
Tickets to space aren't cheap — but Axiom Space is a company pricing its offerings at the decidedly high end of the industry. Its tickets, which cost roughly $70 million, are steep compared to other human spaceflight options offered by space tourism companies. For context, Blue Origin requires a $150,000 refundable deposit for a ticket to space, and auctioned off a ticket for $28 million. Virgin Galactic tickets were previously priced at $600,000, and are expected to go up. So why is Axiom's offering priced so much higher? For starters, the destination is different. Unlike other human spaceflight missions, like Blue Origin's New Shepard trip, Axiom Space missions extend beyond an 11-minute experience, involving much more than a rocket trip into weightlessness and a quick return to Earth. Instead, you'll visit the International Space Station. CEO Tejpaul Bhatia told Business Insider that Axiom Space's private astronaut missions to the ISS last around two weeks. Bhatia added that the $70 million price tag doesn't just cover a ticket to space, but a yearlong program to become a trained astronaut. The company told BI that Axiom Space's private astronauts undergo training that meets NASA standards, though it isn't quite as robust as what is required of NASA astronauts. "It's a full-on enterprise," Bhatia, who hasn't taken a trip himself but told BI he's often referred to by others as an "astronaut whisperer." Private individuals who paid their way to space end up investing far more than just the ticket price, he added. An Axiom Space spokesperson told BI that the trips are open to countries, space agencies, researchers, organizations, and individuals; however, they have to align with the company's mission and overall exact price is determined on a case-by-case basis. And unlike other companies offering human spaceflight, Axiom Space doesn't manufacture its own rockets or spaceships. It forms contracts with companies like SpaceX to send trained astronauts to space. The company said that the missions also open opportunities for countries to access space beyond the partners of the ISS. Its coming mission, AX-4, launching a crewed mission on Monday, includes government contracts with India, Poland, and Hungary. At the government level, Bhatia said the ticket price is a "drop in the bucket" compared to what it would cost a country to build a space program to send humans. "I'm talking like orders of magnitude less," Bhatia said. The US spent about $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973. If you factor in inflation, that would come out to around $237 billion in today's dollars. The company's human spaceflight program is just one part of its larger mission to build the world's first commercial space station to succeed the ISS, which has long served as a platform for international crews and scientific research, and is set to expire by 2030. Dedicating a year to training Bhatia said the roughly yearlong journey begins with the decision to go to space, a process that involves working with customers to develop the mission's criteria and firming up contractual considerations. From there, astronauts typically start training eight months to a year before launch. "They have to dedicate, effectively, that year of their life to training," Bhatia said. Axiom Space partners with NASA, Space, ESA, JAXA, and others to conduct the training, which includes 700 to 1,000 hours of instruction in safety, health, ISS systems, and launch operations, a spokesperson told BI. Once the mission is set in stone, the individuals begin initial onboarding and mission-specific training. That includes familiarization with mission objectives, safety protocols, and team-building. Then the astronauts undergo detailed training at SpaceX facilities, where they learn about the company's Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 launch vehicle. The training focuses on system operations, emergency procedures, and full-mission simulations, a spokesperson told BI. The crew also goes through extensive training at NASA's Johnson Space Center on ISS operations, including payload management, microgravity adaptation, and emergency preparedness, the spokesperson added. Prior to launch, Axiom Space astronauts have to receive approval from international partners to go forth on the mission. About two weeks before takeoff, the crew enters quarantine, a protocol that predates COVID. Bhatia added that starting a month before launch, the crew has to wear masks during any in-person interactions. 'Every minute' of the flight is accounted for Despite spending as much as $70 million for a ticket to space, the experience is far from luxurious. "It's a rugged experience," Bhatia said, adding that it's "not a comfortable place." Bhatia said the crew typically spends about 14 days at the ISS, although sometimes it's less or more depending on the dynamics of spaceflight, including weather considerations. Those two weeks consist of a "very regimented routine," involving hard science and research, Bhatia said. "Every minute is accounted for," the CEO said. The mission also involves significant engagement with the public and media. Bhatia said crew members appear on prime-time news broadcasts live from the station. While Bhatia said there can sometimes be technical difficulties or a transmission drop, for the most part, everything is planned. "There's a lot of controlled systems there," Bhatia said and astronauts are prepared with the skills and knowledge needed for a successful mission. The end of the trip ends with the Dragon Spacecraft making a "small splashdown" in water and a period where the crew adjusts back to gravity. Once they land, crew members are given extensive medical evaluations before post-mission activities begin. Growing interest in private space exploration Bhatia told BI that when he joined the space company as chief revenue officer four years ago, he shifted it toward government sales. Demand for the $70 million private ticket seems to be higher, he added. Bhatia said that the company has sold more private astronaut seats in that time, although they haven't flown yet. "It's less about our ability to sell these tickets," Bhatia said. "It's about an evolution in the market." That evolution is reflected in similar efforts by other companies, like Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which recently made headlines for its first all-female crew, which included Katy Perry and Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. When asked whether backlash toward that mission and commercial space travel in general might impact public support for high-cost missions like Axiom's, Bhatia said he wasn't concerned. "They're not being influenced by those headlines," Bhatia said about the governments sending their citizens to space. Bhatia said suborbital missions are "super cool" for a "space nut," and multiple factors likely contributed to the backlash, all of which he felt could have been spun in a positive way. He said criticism may have been driven by a response to the company behind the mission or the crew who attended the trip. The CEO also said that there tends to be an overarching mindset that people shouldn't spend money on space when there are problems on Earth. "Space and Earth are not mutually exclusive, they never have been and never will be," Bhatia said, adding that humans are part of the universe and space is "our environment as well." Asked about whether he plans to go to space soon, the CEO said he thinks eventually it will happen. For now, though, he said the focus is on getting others to fly. "It's become more of a mission for me to figure it out for others," Bhatia said.
