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This image is from a larger body of work looking at the repercussions of the closing of the Space Shuttle program on the surrounding communities and on the many contradictions the program and its demise engendered. In his collection of short stories, Memories of the Space Age, novelist JG Ballard describes a near future in which the infrastructure of the US Space Program has been abandoned, its gantries left to decay into the Florida swamp while inanimate astronauts circle the earth in an endless orbit. While the reality is not quite as dystopic as he suggests, the slow decline of the space program and its effects on the economy have made many of Ballard’s descriptions eerily prescient. Land-bound spacecraft, derelict motels and dead satellites tumbling through the darkness of space, all serve as evidence of a future age now passed.