NASA / JPL Comet Hitchhiker

JPL Comet Hitchhiker

This is a concept I created with Dr. Masahiro Ono from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the NIAC Symposium in 2015, in cooperation with the Museum of Science Fiction. It’s a spacecraft that can fire a 1000km (around 620 miles) long tether with a warhead into a comet (a Kuiper Belt Object) and use it’s kinetic energy to travel into deep space.

I spent much time building both hitchhiker and comet and I learned alot about spacecrafts and how they are designed. My goal was to create something between the highly complex prototype-like designs that these incredible smart people at the JPL are building and my own taste of science fiction. I tried somehow to extend the NASA look that I’m used to, into a future driven by 3d printed objects and tools. More here: NASA

It needed time getting used to the fact that there is not much surface that would bounce light around for me, like it would on earth – Global Illumination was more a task than a helper. The design of the spacecraft is mostly built with subdivision surface modelling in Cinema 4D and rendered with Vray. The comet was hand sculpted in zBrush and has 9 million polygons.

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“This idea can be intuitively understood by the analogy of fishing. Imagine a fisherman on a small boat tries to catch a big fish that runs at a high relative speed,” he added. “Once the fish is on a hook, the experienced fisherman would let the line go while applying a moderate tension on it, instead of holding it tightly. If the line has a sufficient length, the boat can eventually catch up with the fish with moderate acceleration.”

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NASA / JPL Comet Hitchhiker, 2015