Space is the Place

The idea, like many before it, was born from a deep lament. 

Josh Tabone had been riffing on the information age—how its constant stream of content can be so claustrophobic. We live in a shrinking world, and there’s no better example of it than surfing. Every major session is covered in immediate and intimate detail. Every spot has been mapped. 

For a photographer, it can be suffocating. There are no new angles. Nowhere left to turn. Rather than give in to the futility of it all, Tabone cleared his mind and craned his neck to the heavens.

The 34-year-old lensman from Port Macquarie, Australia, is perpetually exploring different approaches to his craft. You need to be creative if you want to stay relevant. “I sometimes have these ideas for shoots that I will play around with for a while,” he says. “Then you’ll look at them later on and think, ‘That’s actually kind of cool.’” 

He wondered if it would soon be time for surfers to start looking beyond Earth. Could there be life on other planets? Could there be waves, too? What would it all look like? How long until we get there—and how fucking cool would it be to shoot?

It was a left-field thought, sure. But aren’t all the good ones? Tabone jotted down a note in his phone and let the idea percolate. 

*

Tabone isn’t the first human to look up at the sky in wonder. It has been a canvas for countless creation stories. Australia’s First Nations. Egyptians. Mesoamericans. Polynesians. Almost every civilization has embraced the stars. 

The idea of space travel isn’t new either. Millennia-old Indian texts like the Vedas talk of flying machines called vimāna: sophisticated vehicles with advanced technology that explored the cosmos. Did they find any untapped slabs in their universal search?

Noah Beschen.

The literary world has been no different, and no less fantastic in its imagination. 

Lucian of Samosata, a writer born around 125 AD, told the tale of 50 sailors who were blasted to the moon by a giant waterspout, where they met a race of three-headed vultures. They were, then, the first interplanetary blow-ins. In The Man in the Moone, a novel written in the late 1620s by the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin, the protagonist makes the lunar run on a chariot pulled by a flock of swans. 

Technological vision soon found literary and religious parallels. Once Galileo turned his telescope to the sky, it was game on. Reality and fiction intertwined. Imaginations went into hyperdrive. 

Writers like Wells, Verne, Clarke, and Asimov captured the sci-fi zeitgeist and put a proverbial rocket up the space race. By the time of the flying saucer era, in the twentieth century, Carl Jung had reckoned that UFO mania was displacing traditional religious belief systems. If angels with flaming swords, why not also little green men with ray guns? 

This was the birth of a modern myth. See: Roswell, Sun Ra, “May the Force be with you,” Bonzer Vehicles, Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer Level 9: Cosmos, et cetera. 

We have a collective relationship with space that is as long as history itself. 

Which brings us back to Tabone’s phone note. His own smartphone, he learned, is roughly 100,000 times more powerful than the computer that guided the first lunar landing. Already we can hold all of recorded history in our hand. For better or worse, technological progression is exponential. The possibilities are nearly infinite.

So if humanity was to master interstellar travel in the near future, he wondered, and a surf session went down in an otherworldly ocean, what would it actually be like? 

“I guess nature, as a whole, would look completely different on other planets, as a start,” reckons Tabone. “Simple things like gravity or the general landscape, the color of the water, and even what you could see in the sky could be anything. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘How would they get waves?’ Would there be weather systems—similar to Earth—that ebb and flow, creating storms? Or maybe there are huge creatures that roam their ocean floors, creating nonstop waves from constantly mating. Who knows?”

Tabone’s a visual thinker. His brain went into overdrive with the possibilities. Waves are a universal constant. A transfer of energy. They come in many shapes and sizes. Surfers harness only one of them. But how to apply it all? 

*

While it might see the occasional waterspout, there are no vimāna or chariots of swans departing from Port Macquarie anytime soon. Space day trips are still a long way off. So Tabone compromised. 

Noa Deane.

We might not be ready to take surfers to the stars just yet. But we can bring the stars to the surfers—or, like a NASA vacuum chamber, simulate with technology. 

“The concept for this shoot was to create a unique space-like scene in surfing,” says Tabone. “The idea of having less gravity and hitting a mega ramp and tweaking off into outer space. I liked the idea of a black backdrop, like the night sky, with the silhouette of the classic surfboard shape.”

With support from fellow film lord and aspiring cosmonaut Chris Bryan, Tabone went about curating the carefully staged night shoot at the URBNSURF Melbourne wave tank. Months of work and a test shoot went into dialing the specific lighting and synchronization he’d need to get the effect he wanted. He then put out the call to some of the best surfers on (this) planet: Benjamin Howard. Noa Deane. Dion Agius. Ryan Callinan. Harry Bryant. Noah Beschen. Reef Heazlewood. 

The results were surreal, otherworldly. Surfers propelling heavenward. Beads of water and foam flung like so many stars across the deep black of the night. “It’s hard to do airs at night under the stars,” says Agius, “but I guess it’s dark in space, so it is something we will have to get used to for future surf astral travels.”

It all evoked yet another sci-fi reference: Norrin Radd, aka the Silver Surfer, a futuristic alien who traveled the cosmos on an indestructible surfboard that he could control with his mind. Check out the technical control of a Noa Deane grab and try to argue that this crew is not far off it. Further proof of reality and imagination intertwining. 

It might be a time before the first extraterrestrial wetting of the rail. Or the birth of an entire intergalactic surf creation myth. But, as Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” 

In the meantime, we can still dream. And take down notes in our phones.