NASA JPL Comet Hitchhiker

This is a concept I created with Dr. Masahiro Ono from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for this years (2015) NIAC Symposium, in cooperation with the Museum of Science Fiction ( http://www.museumofsciencefiction.org/jpl-hitchhiker/ ). 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.

(whenever you see someone riding a skateboard while holding on to a truck...... think of what I did for NASA).

You can read about it here:
http://www.nasa.gov/content/comet-hitchhiker-harvesting-kinetic-energy-from-small-bodies-to-enable-fast-and-low-cost/#.VLcEZyuG-9U

The technical aspects of the project were quite different to what I'm generally used to. I'm an environment artist and there is not that much environment in space. So, I won't tempt your eyes with detail packed interiors worth several months of work this time. It's a vast, lifeless and hostile emptiness and you can either look at the spacecraft or the comet - nothing in between to distract you.

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 "DIYish" designs that these incredibly smart people at the JPL are building and my own taste of science fiction. I tried somehow to extend the typical NASA look into a future driven by 3d printed objects and tools.

On the 3D side:
It needed time getting used to the fact that there is not much surface that would bounce light around for me - GI was more a task than a helper. The design of the spacecraft is mostly built with subdivision surface in Cinema 4D and rendered with Vray. The comet was built in Zbrush and has 9 million polygons.

I'd like to thank Dr. Masahiro Ono, Greg Vggiano, Raphael Rau and the rest of you for your support.