During Spring Quarter, the Stanford Arts Institute will be profiling the 2014–15 Honors in the Arts cohort. This interdisciplinary honors program allows students in any major to complete a capstone project integrating arts practice or theory with another field of study, To learn more, visit artsinstitute.stanford.edu/honors.

The end of Project Apollo also meant the end of childhood dreams to set foot on “new” ground. Senior Althea Solis, for one, recalled her aspirations of being a scientist, and her fascination with space over 15 years ago.

“People find the infinite out there scary—but I find it quite touching,” Solis said.

Her Honors in the Arts project, a graphic novel on space travel, has an echo of that dreamscape but is more of a contemplation on the morals and ethics of modern day space exploration.

The book is set in 2042, which is the next year during which Mars and Earth are closest together—the close approach—optimal if one is intent on gravitational assist for manned travel. The plot is split into two parts. The first part takes place during the voyage to Mars. A crew of four astronauts is entrusted with the task of setting up and researching for the first colony on Mars, funded by the International Space Exploration Commission (ISEC), a make-believe start-up. The mission is launched in response to the environmental state of planet Earth, which faces a disastrous drought, along with other forms of climate change coupled with agricultural devastation and overpopulation.

It dawns upon one of the astronauts that the mission would inadvertently allow society’s elites to abandon a deteriorating Earth and the less fortunate population. The astronaut spends the voyage plotting out her rebellion against this outcome. The other half of the novel is set on Mars, after the crew has landed. The astronaut then initiates the sabotage of the mission.

Though Solis has no STEM background, she is prioritizing scientific accuracy in this project. The research she has done includes keeping up with space news, interviewing NASA employees and watching NASA’s YouTube Channel—“I probably account for more than 50 percent on each of their videos,” she joked.

“I want to make sure the book I’m creating can be in conversation with contemporary space concerns,” she said. “Sci-fi is not just about what’s accurately going to happen—it’s more of looking at the potentials and asking, ‘What’s off about that? What parts of that future do we want to keep? What, since we’ve anticipated it, can we avoid?”

She anticipates working on the graphic novel for the next several years, through several drafts, until completion—but for Honors in the Arts, under the guidance of her advisers, Scott Hutchins and Gail Wight, Solis is creating 200 pages of fully-scripted and fully-illustrated thumbnails and a 15-page proof-of-concept comic book, which will be essentially serve as a preview of the book.

She will also set up a reading and a book launch as part of her honors project, in the form of an installation in a stairwell in the basement of Cummings and Annenberg. She envisions the walls covered with space posters, the books she used for research stacked in the stairwell, along with her actual graphic novel previews and the notebooks and sketchbooks she used during the process. The installation is modeled after artist Ilya Kabakov’s installation “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment” depicting the scattered remains of a man’s apartment after he had sling-shotted himself into space.

“I want to contextualize the work and invite people to understand that the project is more than the piece of paper I put down,” Solis said. At the same time, however, the comic book format is a way to make the subject accessible. She said, “I can take it to my mom or a random kid, and it could be just as profound for them as it would be for a literature professor. I like the level of playing field this medium gives.”

Solis’s installation will be set up from May 18 to June 10 in the Annenberg stairwell, in the basement of Cummings near the sculpture room. The reading will be on May 20, 4:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m, location to be announced.