Gallery: Jonathon Keats' Space Agency Launches Arty Exotourism
01lasa-poster
Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats' indie Local Air & Space Administration, or LASA, has pwned President Obama and NASA's quest to land astronauts on asteroids and even Mars. And he did it for less than $200. That's because the arty prankster planted succulents in a pulverized Kuiper Belt asteroid for 21 days, and nurtured potatoes in dissolved lunar anorthosite and Martian shergottite mineral water. But that's not the point. Keats' point is perhaps that the concept of interstellar travel should be reoriented to bringing ourselves closer to the asteroids, moons, planets and life already, er, living on our own planet. Especially if they can so handily -- root-ily? cactus-ly? -- beat us in the space race. "We're not the first and foremost in everything," Keats (right) told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. "On certain matters, such as the nature of Mars, potatoes now know more than we do. We can learn from them, as we can learn from all species." Keats' exotourism explorations touch down this month. On Monday, [LASA's non-human astronauts](http://www.csuchico.edu/hfa/hc/gallery.html) enter public orbit at the indie commercial space agency's modest headquarters on Cailfornia State University's Chico campus. A reception for LASA's exotourism bureau lands Oct. 21 at San Francisco's [Modernism Gallery](http://www.modernisminc.com/exhibitions/Jonathon_KEATS--MARS_HAS_ARRIVED). Interested human exotourists can buy even a bottled Martian mineral water, if they want to go transhuman, according to Keats. "The minerals, including pyroxene and ulvospinel and pigeonite, will be used by your body to make bone and tissue," he said. "Exploring Mars in this way, you'll start to go native." We picked [Keats' crafty brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathon_Keats) -- which once tried to [engineer God](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/09/65066) in a petri dish and create [antimatter currency](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/underwire/2009/10/jonathon-keats-antimatter-currency), among many other engaging experiments -- in the LASA gallery above. Click through the interview and images of Keats' creative exotourism and let us know in the comments section below if you're on board for the ride.
02cactus-grid--lo-
__Wired.com:__ We sent chimps and humans into orbit, but only you would think of sending succulents and potatoes to asteroids, moons and planets. __Jonathon Keats:__ Like all astronauts, these potatoes and cacti are test pilots. And if you think of the greatest test pilots in history, from Chuck Yeager to Neil Armstrong, you find that they're highly intelligent and also extremely dumb: Intelligent enough to navigate the unknown, and dumb enough to let themselves be launched in the first place. Plants also have these essential traits: The smarts to adapt to novel conditions and the stupidity not to run away.
03lasa-potato-candidates-lo-
__Wired.com:__ Why potatoes? __Keats:__ Few people, in my experience, have ever revered a potato, let alone envied one. We tend to eat them, and of course the Irish cursed them during the Great Famine. But now here's the chance for children to look up to potatoes as heroic, just as John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin were once role models.
04lasa-hammer-lo-
__Wired.com:__ How much did you spend to acquire and beat these rocks into soil? __Keats:__ The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has an annual budget of $19 billion. The Local Air and Space Administration has a budget of approximately $190, give or take 10 bucks. As a result, we can't afford an Orion space capsule or crates of astronaut ice cream, and what we do use, we buy at discount stores and thrift shops. NASA paid $100,000 for the tool bag lost in space a couple years ago by Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper. The hammer we bought to smash meteorites cost $1.99, and it had a real wooden handle.
05mars-closeup-lasa--c-lo-
__Wired.com:__ How much did the meteoric material, including that cool piece of Martian basaltic shergottite from meteorite NWA 2975 (above), set you back? __Keats:__ The meteoritic material cost a bit more than LASA's hammer. On eBay you can buy unclassified ordinary chondrites for around 10 cents a gram, and you need a couple hundred grams to support a small cactus. Beyond that there was the labor, which I did myself. Meteorites tend to be very hard, so it took a good few hours. But that's a lot shorter than the estimated decade of preparation NASA is anticipating before their first asteroidal mission gets off the ground. __Wired.com:__ Sounds like you're trying to keep LASA an indie operation. __Keats:__ One of the keys to our program is not to become infatuated with technological bling, to get into competition with science fiction and dress reality up like Star Trek. Another key to our program is to take a DIY approach to problem-solving instead of contracting Lockheed-Martin. And all that we do is completely open-source. We hold no patents and have no secrets. If NASA wants to follow our lead, we're happy to help make it happen. They can even borrow our hammer.
06lasa-potato-training-lo-
__Wired.com:__ What does it say about us that we're careless with Earth but can't wait to get to Mars? __Keats:__ Most of the talk about Mars doesn't concern exploration so much as exploitation: how to mine it, remodel it, make it habitable, as much as possible like our planet even as our planet becomes less hospitable to life. There's a sort of cynical optimism at work. We might blame it on technophilia, but I suspect it may just be the same attitude that drove Manifest Destiny, another instance of our almost innate colonialism. __Wired.com:__ We're jerks. __Keats:__ Of course by colonialist standards, potatoes will have territorial claim to Mars since they've beat *Homo sapiens*, and what's most hospitable to them may be to inhabit it without us around.
07lasa-water--new--1-lo-
__Wired.com:__ LASA is also selling bottled Martian water, so that earthbound humans can absorb the Red Planet into their bodies. But if we drink bottled Martian mineral water, will we get space madness? __Keats:__ On the contrary, I think the mineral water may be an antidote for the madness we exhibit living on this planet. What is most revolutionary about Martian mineral water as a vehicle of exotourism is that it not only gives you a genuine Martian experience but also makes Mars a part of you. You'll become a hybrid Martian/Earthling, a universal alien. If we became a bit alien, we might be able to discover more in common.
08space-water--closeup-lo-
__Wired.com:__ Do you think open-sourced exotourism will catch on? __Keats:__ I believe the future of space exploration needs to be open source. The primary reason our government went to the moon was Cold War showmanship, and now companies from Boeing to SpaceX are just looking to turn a profit. Neither is conducive to curiosity, which seems to me the most compelling motivation to visit other planets, or to drink them.
09lasa-lab--1-lo-
__Wired.com:__ What should open-minded curiosity-seekers take most from this latest project of yours? __Keats:__ What's important for me is that we set a precedent, and I believe that we've done that by demonstrating that exploring Mars is as easy as people are willing to let it be. In fact, we may have set two precedents: As Martian hybrids, those potatoes are the first alien life forms ever detected. And they're not on some Goldilocks planet orbiting Gliese 581. They're right here in California.
