An artist sends a huge diamond sculpture in space

If the goal of art is to expand our minds, how does this change when the artwork is 350 miles away in Earth orbit?

This is a question at the heart of Orbital Reflector, a project by artist Trevor Paglen and the Nevada Museum of Art, which will see a brilliant diamond-shaped sculpture over 100 feet long launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, middle -November.

The reflective and non-functional satellite, visible to the naked eye and gravitating around the Earth for several weeks before being consumed unnecessarily in the atmosphere, is intended to arouse wonder and ask the viewer to "take into account our place in the universe" and to "reinvent how we live together" on Earth, according to the project website.

The actual sculpture will be housed inside an object the size of a brick called CubeSat and will run and inflate itself like a balloon. The sunlight will be reflected on the sculpture, built in a material similar to the Mylar, making the artwork – the size of two school buses fully inflated – visible from the Earth.

The works of art could be seen by a very large number of people around the world.

This is not the first work in space, however.

Nearly 50 years ago, a small ceramic commissioned by Forrest Myers and bearing the marks of Andy Warhol, David Novros, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain and Claes Oldenburg would have been attached to the Apollo 12 probe and would have been left on the moon with other personal items to astronauts. Two years later, the crew of Apollo 15 laid on the moon a sculpture of Paul Van Hoeydonck to commemorate the astronauts killed in the performance of their duties.

Paglen, a recent MacArthur Fellow, began building a team of advisors in 2008, including academics, engineers and other aerospace stakeholders, reports PBS. Six years later, he joined the Nevada Museum of Art and they agreed to join him.

"For me, it was important to create a kind of catalyst for people to go out and look at the sky and think about … the politics of space and public space," Paglen said. CBS News.

Paglen continued: "I noticed that there was a kind of military occupation of space that was in place a long time ago. I started thinking about the possibility that the space is different.

Not everyone in the scientific community likes his idea.

"It's the spatial equivalent of someone who places a neon signboard right outside your bedroom window," Gizmodo Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center, told Gizmodo.

In response to critics from some astronomers at Artnet, Paglen asked why hundreds of other weather satellites and rocket corps launched each year had not elicited the same negative reactions.

"Why are we offended by a sculpture in space while we are not by nuclear missile targeting devices or mass surveillance devices, or by satellites with nuclear engines that are likely to fall into the air?" earth and disperse radioactive waste everywhere? He asked.

"From my experience, most astronomers were excited about the possibility that this project will allow them to share their wonder in the face of the sky," Paglen told Artnet, noting that he had worked closely with astronomers and scientists to develop the orbital reflector. "If you want to follow, you will learn how the orbits and the functioning of the planet."