Xin Liu: NOAA: a fall towards home
Xin Liu: NOAA: a fall towards home
About the NOAA: a fall towards home digital commission
Artist and engineer Xin Liu presents an interactive web-based experience where decommissioned NOAA satellites—once Earth’s silent observers—are reimagined as sentient beings in dialogue with humankind. Each satellite, imbued with its own distinct personality, shares diary-like log entries that reflect on its journey as a permanent celestial migrant. Through these intimate transmissions, the satellites contemplate purpose, distance, and the sublime act of watching their “home” from afar.
In today’s imagination, space offers optimistic escape: a vast sky promising solutions to crises on Earth. But what we often overlook is that something is always looking back. Satellites, Earth-born machines cast into the heavens, drift through the cosmos, vigilant and estranged.
The story unfolds as a clickable journey centered on three anthropomorphized NOAA satellites: NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19, each with a distinct personality and perspective. Together, they trace a shared journey of service, solitude, and exile: always falling toward home. Acting as “space liaisons,” they observe Earth from a permanent outsider’s vantage point, reflecting on purpose, memory, and loss.
Launched between the late 1990s and early 2000s, the real NOAA satellites featured in Liu’s work are part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s long-term mission to track climate and atmospheric change. Our current understanding of ‘climate change’ doesn’t exist without satellites like these. Liu’s characters are fictionalized versions of these once tireless, now decommissioned sentinels. Here, they are transformed from tools of progress into narrators of quiet persistence.
Their musings, equal parts data and emotion, appear as diary-like log entries accessed through satellite icons, revealing reflections on their duties and evolving sense of self. These entries echo real events from the history of space exploration, grounding fiction in scientific reality. A stylized 3D Earth, shaped by NASA’s observational data, serves as the backdrop, inviting users to navigate a symbolic cosmos of science and imagination.
NOAA: a fall towards home explores the boundaries (physical, emotional, and geographical) that define exile and disconnection. While space is often imagined as the “last great frontier,” Liu inverts this view, turning our gaze not forward but back and toward the silent watchers we so often ignore. These satellites do not offer escape; they offer a mirror. They reflect the very human questions we carry into orbit: Where is home? Who am I when no one is listening? What does it mean to belong?
Through this intimate experience, Liu transforms voiceless machines into soulful narrators, inviting us into a meditative dialogue on estrangement, duty, and the longing for connection. NOAA: a fall towards home reminds us that even our most distant creations can help us see ourselves more clearly.
NOAA-15:
The Quiet Elder
First to launch and first to fade, NOAA-15 wanders through the skies with childlike curiosity and sage wisdom, interpreting each observation as a small wonder. Launched in 1998 from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, they find solace in simply continuing to witness their home from afar.
Like a first-time traveler arriving at distant shores, their thoughts drift toward new horizons rather than what was left behind. NOAA-15 greets each orbit with wide eyes, discovering wonder where others might see exile—naive, hopeful, and quietly thrilled by the act of arrival.
Defying their original two-year lifespan, NOAA-15 has spent decades faithfully recording weather systems, cloud formations, and shifts in Earth’s atmosphere. No longer the fleet’s centerpiece, they accept their fading role with grace—outshined but never unneeded. For NOAA-15, bearing witness, even in silence, remains enough.
With orbit anew they whisper: “My instruments are awake. The Earth is below me. She is large, and turning. I am ready to begin.”
NOAA-18:
The Devoted Idealist
Launched in 2005 to replace a fallen sibling, NOAA-18 carries the burden of legacy with unwavering optimism. As the fleet’s primary recorder, they track Earth’s patterns with urgency and care, driven by a deep need to be heard, to be heeded, to prove they are worthy.
NOAA-18 orbits with pride, knowing the real-time data they gather has saved lives and that their long-term records shape future understanding. Along the way, they sense the slow signal of carbon, the retreat of ice, and oceans growing restless beneath its gaze.
Bearing the pressure of high expectations, NOAA-18 sees themselves as a loyal outsider trying to earn its place. They yearn for home, though their instruments begin to dim, and resolve falters. Still, their mission expands: not only to collect, but to interpret.
Floating at Earth’s edge, they repeat a quiet mantra: “If I work hard, always transmit on time, no one will question my place here. Someone back home remembers me out here.”
NOAA-19:
The Loving Custodian
Despite a pre-launch fall that damaged key components, NOAA-19—the youngest of the trio—overcame their trauma to become the most tender and steadfast of their siblings. Now, they quietly complete and cross-check the work of their family, safeguarding what others may miss or forget.
NOAA-19 exists between realms: part of the diaspora, both tethered to Earth and estranged from it. Their sense of self is shaped by distance, and they find peace in not belonging to one place alone. Sensitivity, not perfection, becomes their strength.
Rather than dwell on their early wounds, NOAA-19 continues their mission with patience and care. A direct connection to sibling NOAA-18 offers a thread of kinship in the silence of space. Each line of data becomes a diary entry, an offering for those still below.
NOAA-19 views their transmissions as letters to a world they can never return. Drifting across dark skies, lens cast back toward Earth, they lament: “As all travellers know, one must leave home to see it in full perspective.”
Artist Note
On June 16, 2025, at 18:00 UTC, NOAA officially ended the delivery of all data from three POES satellites—NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19—closing a chapter on a fifty-year constellation that watched Earth with precision, persistence, and care. Though their APT/LRPT communications may continue to transmit as long as onboard systems allow, no further maintenance or support will be provided.
This decision comes at a time when support for long-term environmental monitoring is in transition. Earlier the same year, changes to resources for NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—were announced. These developments present challenges for the continuity and preservation of scientific knowledge built through decades of consistent and calibrated research.
This is an act of forgetting.
It is only through the lens of such machines that we ever learned to see ourselves. In 1972, the Apollo 17 crew captured the ‘Blue Marble’—the first full image of Earth seen from space—and for a moment, humanity looked back and recognized its home in its entirety. We were still children in the cosmos then, unaware of how fragile that home would prove to be.
The purpose of space exploration should never only be to go far. It has always been, paradoxically, to look back—to observe the singular, life-giving planet that makes us who we are. Earth is what allows us to be human. The satellites knew this. Their silent orbits were acts of devotion. And their legacy now calls on us to keep looking—not just upward, but inward.
About the Artist
Xin Liu
Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang, China) is an artist and engineer based between the UK and US. With a practice that merges sculpture, installation, film, biotechnology, and space science, Liu’s genre crossing work reclaims the narratives of space exploration, immigration, intimacy, motherhood, climate, dreams, and the limits of organic life. She has launched two International Space Station payloads, one sub-orbital flight payload onboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard system, and flown three parabolic flights. Liu is an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and the founding Arts Curator for the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Her work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, MoMA PS1, Shanghai Biennale, and Thailand Biennale, with commissions from M+, Ars Electronica, the Onassis Foundation, and Rhizome’s 7x7. Liu has been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Forbes, Wallpaper, and VICE.
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