Spacecraft select Islands / J.G. Ballard : Concrete Island (1974)

Architect Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar onto a section of wasteland between the Westway dual carriageway and M4 Motorway. Stranded, he decides to remain on the ‘island’ for the rest of his life.

Spacecraft select Islands / Simon and Garfunkel : I am a Rock (1965)

“And a rock feels no pain; and an island never cries.” This song, written by Paul Simon, features on their 1966 album Sounds of Silence. Seemingly the antithesis to the idiom ‘no man is a rock’, it reveals the melancholy inherent in a life of emotional solitude.

Spacecraft select Islands / Holden Caulfield

The lead character in J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, Caulfield’s cynicism and distance from the world has made him a world famous symbol of teen angst and rebellion.

Spacecraft select Islands / Tom Hanks

Cast Away (2000) and Terminal (2004) both see Hanks isolated from the world. One on a desert island in the South Pacific, the other in John F. Kennedy Airport, New York.

Spacecraft select Islands / St. Helena

The volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean, Britain’s second oldest colony, St. Helena is one of the most isolated islands in the world. It was also the site of exile for Napoleon Bonaparte, who died from arsenic poisoning contracted from his wallpaper after six years on the island.

Spacecraft select Islands / Anitti Laitinen : It’s My Island (2007)

Finnish artist Laitinen created a micro-nation dragging over two hundred sand bags into the Blatic Sea and building his own island.

Spacecraft select Islands / Dubai Archipelagos

Palm Island and The World are artificially created archipelagos in Dubai. One created in the shape of a Palm, the other a cluster of islands representing a world map, they were dredged and constructed as centres of commerce and entertainment. Still in construction, islands remain available to purchase.

Spacecraft select Islands / Maldives

The Maldives is made up of a cluster of 1,192 islands in the Indian Ocean. 200 are inhabited and 98 are developed as luxury hotels. As the Maldives does not recognise Daylight Saving Time, many island resorts have adopted their own time schedule meaning each individual hotel exists in its own unique time zone.

Spacecraft select Islands / Internation Space Station (ISS)

The International Space Station uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as its time zone. UTC is almost exactly the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) only more precise, being based on International Atomic Time (TAI). Astronauts aboard the ISS experience sixteen sunrises and sunsets a day, so adapting time in relation to a typical twenty-four hour Earth day is essential.

Spacecraft select Islands / A Coney Island of the Mind

The collected poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, published in 1958, were originally created with a jazz accompaniment. In Ferlinghetti’s words, “The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller’s INTO THE NIGHT LIFE. It is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them – as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.”