It still makes Bill Dolson laugh when he catches himself saying things like, “The average rocket launch only uses half the capacity of the boosters.

“It’s funny to talk about this as an artist,” he says. “But that’s what it is.”

Dolson’s artistic ambitions aren’t so complicated. He just wants to make a drawing. It’s just that instead of a piece of paper, he wants to use the entire night sky—and instead of a pencil, he wants to use meteoroids. His latest project, called The Reentry Series, is still in the planning stages. If he can pull it off in the two to three-year timetable he’s set for himself, it’s slated to be the most epically scaled art project the world has ever known.

Here’s how it works: About 10 baseball-sized spheres of metal get loaded into a simple deployment mechanism that piggybacks onto the same Russian rocket that supplies the International Space Station (ISS) every month. Once it gets there, Dolson’s launcher waits until the ISS’s orbit lines up with the Eastern Seaboard. Then, the spheres are released—perfectly timed to burn up in the atmosphere (high above cruising altitude for commercial aircraft). From Washington, D.C. all the way to Boston, they will appear as blazing parallel lines streaking across the sky, bright as a full moon.

Of course, the real art is figuring out how to pull all of this off. Dolson just might. He’s done the renderings and the simulations. He’s enlisted the help of scientists at NASA’s SETI institute and Orbital Debris Program Office (the guys who track space junk) to figure out all the math. Now he’s finishing up a residency at New York’s prestigious Eyebeam Gallery, a digital art center that funded a detailed study he plans to put in front of people like Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson—because Reentry won’t come cheap. (Another fun fact Dolson learned? It costs $10,000 a pound to put something in orbit.)

But the project is more than just spectacle. “There’s a cultural back on it, too,” he says. “Historically, comets and meteors have been considered acts of God. The idea is that now we can do this artificially. It should give an extreme awareness of our ability to modify the environment.”

Reentry is just one of Dolson’s big ideas. Inspired by land artists such as Robert Smithson, his real Damascus moment came when conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim suggested the possibility of manipulating “dynamic physical processes that are ephemeral—like clouds—and not just mounds of dirt.” Since then, Dolson has sketched plans for using everything from power grids to controlled brush fires. His portfolio is full of dalliances in video art, photography, and sculpture, but he cultivated a certain fanaticism for the grand when he moved to New Mexico and became a glider pilot. “From the air, I would see these forest fires make huge sculptures of smoke,” he says, “and it gave me an idea of how easy it would be to work at that scale.” Then, Dolson puts his enthusiasm in check—but only for a moment. “OK. Not easy—but possible.” —Ian Daly

www.billdolson.com

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