It seems that the themes that tug at us reveal themselves in every project that we explore. I sat listening to The Commander Thinks Aloud (2005, The Long Winters) in the car on repeat, I was trapped by the interplay of the beautiful hopefulness and the inevitable sadness. The layering of folky piano, cosmic synthesisers, and military drums create a tension between uplifting and grounding. The track imagines the last moments of the crew of the Columbia Shuttle disaster.

Click to hear a Clip of John Roderick the writer of the song discussing his thoughts on writing the song.

Dogs and birds on lawns. From here I can touch the sun. Put your jacket on, I feel we are being born.

(The Commander Thinks Aloud, 2005, The Long Winters)

I find this question of mundane followed by sublime occupies a lot of my ideas.

I wondered why I felt the need to ground my voyager film, Space Exploration for me is sublime, it is romance. Early in our relationship my wife and I went to see a shuttle launch, it is not just science but spiritual.

But how do we square this with the costs of this dreaming; human, financial, environmental, personal. For all the success there are stories of failed marriages, the memorial, budgets, failed careers, toxic waste.

I found myself thinking back to the ideas of the romantics, the nieve vistas dreaming of imagined ideal pasts, the power, beauty, inspiring and terrifying nature. Head in the clouds no realistic view of the world. I find many of the ideas of the romantics troubling, an idealisation of the natural world, the primacy of mans place in viewing it. But where is the joy if you can’t dream big, a life bounded only by the tangible.

I thought about the realism and abstraction debate in art. Abstraction tried to remove the trappings of the tangible world to reach a deeper more profound truth. But how can we waste time of intellectual navel gazing when there are so many obvious real problems that are in front of us. Goya.

These are the questions of life, is it this physical world of sensation or is the some deeper spiritual journey.

Stuck in mundane commuter traffic, listening to that track I was in two places at once, soaring above it all and trapped in a hot steel box. I stepped out and saw this…

I like daytime moon. How odd it looks against a blue sky, mischievous, almost subversive.

I want to try and address this space with this film as impossibly ambitious as that is, that is the point.