DIY Friday: Parade!
It’s the final DIY Friday of 2007…. so what should you be working on?
A float for your local New Year’s Day parade, of course.
Few places are better for community parades then Santa Cruz, California, which holds the Last Night Santa Cruz DIY Parade every year. You can check out the highlights from previous years here.
Meanwhile, we’re waiting in anticipation to see NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Rose Bowl parade float on Tuesday, which will honor the 50th anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1:
On the parade float, Explorer 1 fires off the launch pad at the center. In its wake arises a collection of historic JPL robotic explorers, as well as planetary ports of call. On one of the solar panels displays a floral “photographic” representation of the Explorer pioneers whose vision ignited the spark for U.S. space exploration — William Pickering, then director of JPL, scientist James Van Allen and rocket designer Wernher von Braun. Ascending from Explorer’s fiery plume are a Martian orbiter and a six- wheeled Mars Science Laboratory, which in 2010 will carry on the tradition of NASA/JPL robotic exploration. On the other edge of the plume, climbing beyond the garland of rings surrounding the planet Saturn is JPL’s Voyager 1 — humanity’s most distant emissary — which is now on its journey headed into interstellar space.
The 25-foot-tall float is jacketed by everything from black seaweed, eucalyptus leaves, split pea and ground walnut shells to daisies, roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, carnations, strawflower and cut everlasting.
From all of us at Really Rocket Science — Happy New Year!
