Artistic Frontiers in Virtual Reality
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At a conference called “Inner Reality and Outer Space” sponsored by the Jung Institute in San Francisco several years ago, former astronaut Rusty Schweickort told a wonderful story. He was outside the spacecraft, the first astronaut in space without a tether-nothing but a backpack to supply air. His goal was to determine whether a person could move hand-overhand over the surface of the capsule to reenter it, and astronaut Dove Scott was to take pictures of him from inside. The camera jammed, and commander Jim McDivott gave Scott five minutes to try to fix it. For that interval, Schweickort says, he became “the world’s first unemployed astronaut.” He swung out on one arm and regarded the Earth, and at that moment he realized that he had a choice. He asked himself, “Am I going to let it in?” He did, and his life changed.
