E|A|S (Evolving Asteroid Starship), DStart (TU Delft Starship Team)
To have a look at some of the installations of the Gogbot Festival 2017 I went to the Menistenkerk in Enschede. In this church you could find a lot of different installations from various artists. Immediately my attention was drawn towards a certain installation in the room. This installation has been made to simulate a space journey. Not a regular one, but one where the spaceship expands during the journey. It uses asteroids as resources to let the spacecraft grow. These materials first have to be processed to be used as a resource for the 3D-printers on board. With these printers all kinds of objects can be made to expand the spacecraft. Not only the spaceship grows, but the population on board as well. In this way the spacecraft and its inhabitants grow and it becomes a small society. To make all the calculations of the simulator 48 raspberry pi’s are connected in parallel. Together all the mini computers have the same power as 13 MacBook pro’s. The people behind all of this are planning to extend the amount of Raspberry Pi’s used in this installation to maybe even establish a world record.
I liked this installation most because of the idea behind it, but also because of the execution. The idea because I think it’s really cool to be able to let a spacecraft grow it’s long journey with the resource it finds while travelling. The execution because in the first place looks really cool and futuristic, but also because of the computers being used. One of those tiny computers itself isn’t really powerful. However, when you combine the power of all these little computers, they form a supercomputer and are way more powerful than a desktop while the price and the power consumption are really low.