THE POWER OF IMAGINATION
I have never forgotten my first sight of Tomorrowland. I was six and at Disneyland and feeling the power of the magic. Exploring all the Lands of Disney was like drifting from dream-to-dream and seeing a fairy flying here, haunted by a ticking crocodile there, and everywhere familiar movie tunes played in the air carrying me higher yet, and it all cast a magic spell on me for life.
Then, looming in the distance, a rocket appeared. A white rocket with fins striped in red, and counting-down for launch. I wanted to be on that rocket ride. Disappointed, it was not a ride but the promise of what one day become real, and that tomorrow’s ideas would be today’s as long as we could create it. That day is here.
What brings us to today’s bold new era of space flight was not found on a pirate’s secret map or locked away inside a castle, but awaited, as it always has, inside each of us. It is that essential ingredient for discovery and change: IMAGINATION. Imagination is the ingredient vital to our future and that benefits all of humankind. Imagination must be encouraged, allowed to be tested, and we must find all possible ways to inspire it.
CREATES A VOICE
Imagination was the first step that created our journey to the stars, and if you listen carefully you can hear the echoes of how it began. It began with the questions of curiosity: “What if?”, “How about?”, “Could it be this instead of that?”, and “This sounds crazy, but?” Then a hand swiftly draws the idea across the paper, the white board, or the chalk board and the first look of what might be takes flight.
THAT INVENTS THE FUTURE
Invite imagination and Tomorrowland that is only a vision becomes the reality of Tomorrow Landing. I captured imagination with a new breakthrough called Space Games and looked for a motivated group of students to test it. It is a game that is invented for space use and can be made and played only while in space. Space Games creates our tomorrows by students today. It opens the door to that white rocket fins striped in red and begins a new revolution of imagination. Students collaborate and ambitiously invent fun while they show that imagination requires trial-and-error, and persistence, and an understanding of all the possibilities of what to make in zero gravity on a 3D printer. The goal: A game for astronauts to create on that printer, and hopefully enjoy playing. But what’s invented is much more than this goal.
Inspired too are our visionaries of the future. The place where they imagine their game, where they imagine being one day, is way outside usual the box, or outside the usual of anything – and is on the incomparable International Space Station (ISS) where a crew of six astronauts experiment and provide new products and applications for our benefit on Earth: better hearing devices and artificial limbs, insulin pumps, workout machines, and scratch resistant lenses to name a few.
& PLAYING IT FORWARD BENEFITS US ALL
Space Games is today a reality and an experiment. It is scheduled to be manufactured this Fall on the ISS and provide an opportunity to invite the imagination of1000’s more students to create and launch their dreams too. Gravity Games, it could be said, sprung from my Tomorrowland of yesterday, now played forward. It will benefit us all one day, with inventions yet to be imagined.
It is wonder and curiosity that will take us further, deeper into space, and to what is so uniquely human in us: to imagine and to discover.
Our action: We must commit to look for, and create, new breakthroughs for Tomorrowland in our selves and in others. Dream big. Do what you love. Imagine. Inspire. And create it.
Gravity Games has been invited to present our processes to the 5th Annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference in July, 2016, in San Diego. The ISS R&D Conference “unites the global ISS user community to push the boundaries of innovation.” It is my hope as founder of Gravity Games, that the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) and NASA will offer Gravity Games as a way to leverage the imagination for space flight among our youth everywhere.