Another Final Frontier

A series of three zines, printed on newsprint.

Another Final Frontier is a project with Shona Kitchen, with writing by Charlie Hailey. This work investigates the layered relationship between NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (MINWR), which co-inhabit the same geographic footprint. Our focus centered on a single artificial landform—an unnamed spoil island created circa 1950 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway. This island is part of a 3,000-mile string of spoil deposits that stretch from New York to Brownsville, Texas, largely uncharted and seldom studied.

These islands—ephemeral, shifting, and topographically reversed—exist in liminal zones between wet and dry, public and private, terrestrial and aquatic, natural and engineered. Kitchen and I lived on one such island, constructing a temporary habitat modeled after NASA’s Mars analogues—terrestrial simulations of extraterrestrial living conditions. This act became the heart of Another Final Frontier, a critique of space colonization rhetoric, particularly efforts to terraform Mars.

Employing a “leave no trace” ethos and utilizing temporary architecture, the project proposes alternative models for human presence in the overlooked ecologies of Earth’s marginal zones—ones grounded in mobility, impermanence, and attunement to place. The projectsurfaces layered histories of terraforming in this region, from the construction of dunes to protect launchpads, to Indigenous shell middens, to the digging of canals. Even invasive fire ants alter terrain by constructing vast subterranean structures. These entangled histories were primarily explored through panels, public talks, and supporting texts (2021-25).