History
It was created by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck, who met astronaut David Scott at a dinner party. Van Hoeydonck was asked to create a small statuette to commemorate those astronauts and cosmonauts who have lost their lives in the furtherance of space exploration. Van Hoeydonck was given a set of design restrictions: that the sculpture was to be both lightweight and sturdy, capable of withstanding the temperature extremes of the Moon; it could not be identifiably male or female, nor of any identifiable ethnic group. In accordance with Scott's wish to avoid the commercialization of space, Van Hoeydonck's name would not be made public.
Read more about this topic: Fallen Astronaut
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)