I am pleased to say that SkySat-Chocolate was a great success at this morning’s launch party! There was much oohing and aahing as people passed by.

Here are two closeups that my friend Lieven generously shot for me. This is the outside:

And here is the interior, showing the mirror inside:

The thing in the far back is the primary mirror (for the camera), the silvery piece up front is the secondary mirror. The doohickey on the right is the antenna (I think).

As you can see, there are a number of imperfections – the room was really too hot to be working with chocolate, so the chocolate is streaky in some areas. And the welding job isn’t great – there are drips of chocolate visible along the edges. But on the whole it’s quite good for a first attempt at chocolate sculpture, and I’m happy with it.

Here are a few photos from the making of SkySat-Chocolate. Here are the mirrors, cast using an inflatable ball dipped into white chocolate:

And here is the mirror after being trimmed and painted with silver colored cocoa butter. I’m in the process of carving the holes for the antenna, as you can see:

Here is the Google-Skybox logo that went onto the side. I painted a sheet of acetate with colored cocoa butter, then poured white chocolate over the acetate sheet. The colored cocoa butter bonded to the chocolate, transferring the logo to the sheet of white chocolate:

(The logo is the Skybox logo in Google rainbow colors, to reflect both companies. Purely unofficial, of course.)

The “solar panels” on the sides were created by carving a stencil, then using a paint roller to apply melted chocolate through the holes on the stencil. Before the chocolate hardened, I sifted on a mix of blue and black edible glitter, resulting in these:

I then drizzled glue, I mean chocolate, over the panel and applied the white chocolate logos to two of the sides, like this:

Finally, I got Mike to help me assemble the satellite. He held the pieces in place while I glued them together with melted chocolate, “freezing” them in place by spraying them with Magic Freeze, a compressed-gas product designed to cool things rapidly. (It was developed for pastry chefs doing chocolate sculpture and other things for which quick chilling is useful.) Here is what it looked like with two sides on:

It’s a tribute either to my incredibly good planning or my incredibly good luck that the pieces all lined up perfectly, with only the tiniest of gaps when the last part was put into place:

And then we put it onto a board and glued it down with (what else?) more chocolate, and added the open spacecraft door.

Here is SkySat-Chocolate at the party:

I’m pleased to say that it was quite well-received, and also that people had no compunctions about eating it after we gave the word. I had been a bit worried that it wouldn’t get eaten, which would have been a tragic waste of fifteen pounds of top-quality Valrhona chocolate. But when I left work today, only chocolate rubble was left. A successful launch!

And the other satellite? Oh yes, that one! I’m very pleased to announce that SkySat-2 launched successfully into low earth orbit. From our official company blog:

We are happy to announce the launch of SkySat-2 this morning aboard a Soyuz-2/Fregat rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. We made contact with the satellite on the first pass.

Below is an image taken by SkySat-1 of SkySat-2’s launch pad on July 7, 2014 and a photo taken by Roscosmos of the Soyuz-2/Fregat rocket on July 8, 2014.

And, finally, where are the cats amidst all this space exploration? Well, Fritz hasn’t quite made it into low earth orbit yet, but he’s definitely trying to fly. Here he is, perched atop the shower door – a good five-foot leap, onto a ledge no more than three inches wide. (He is obviously not worried about gravity!)

I had a wonderful time at Complex Weavers Seminars! Three days spent immersed in weaving, talking in betweentimes with equally passionate weavers. In addition to the many interesting seminars, there were some splendid exhibits – this year’s Complexity exhibit was the best show of handwoven textiles I have seen to date. Every piece was interesting and innovative, some using techniques I had never seen before, others using traditional techniques with a twist. It would almost have been worth the trip to Tacoma by itself. So if you are in the Providence area, do check it out during Convergence. It’s well worth seeing.

The Off the Runway show was also wonderful – some of the textiles there could easily have won prizes at any other weaving show. I was seated a little too far away to really take in much of the Fashion Show, but really enjoyed the Marketplace and Silent Auction. And I’m pleased to say that my fifteen small boxes of chocolates raised $333 for the Complexity fund.

Now, of course, I’m back home and chocolatiering. Skybox is launching its second satellite on Tuesday, and I’ve decided to celebrate by making a mockup of the satellite – in chocolate! So far I’ve just created the prototype and poured the slabs that make up the satellite body. Tonight I’ll paint the Skybox-Google logo onto transfer sheets for use in decorating the sides of the spacecraft. And tomorrow I’ll cast the primary mirror and the radio dish, paint them with colored cocoa butter, and assemble the whole thing together. It’s my first attempt at chocolate sculpture so I don’t know how well it will go, but so far it’s looking pretty good. Not perfect, but not bad for a first try either. And I’ll have time on Sunday to fix mistakes.

Here’s the original satellite (actually SkySat-1, but the exteriors of  both satellites are identical):

And here’s my mockup:

The dish and antenna didn’t make it into the mockup, but I’m planning to add them (and the primary mirror, at the bottom of the interior) in the final version. I’ll be casting both dish and mirror in white chocolate tomorrow, using balloons and a small beach ball to get the curvature right.

Here is the front panel, the center tube, and one strut, made in chocolate:

And here is one of the sides, complete with “solar panels” (a mix of blue and black edible sparkles):

I carved the stencil yesterday, then used a foam roller to apply tempered chocolate, and finally sifted the edible sparkles onto the chocolate, gluing them on. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty good!

And where have the cats been? Why, helping, of course! Here are Fritz and Tigress helping me put together the prototype.

It started innocently enough, with this cool YouTube video of a quadcopter made from chocolate:

I was all set to build one of my own, but then I realized I could do something much, much cooler. The launch of SkySat-2 is coming up fast, and obviously something needs to be done to mark the occasion! And what better way to improve a launch party than to make your own chocolate satellite?

So I am working on a rendition of SkySat-2 – in chocolate.

I haven’t done chocolate sculpture before, outside of a single half-day class over a decade ago. But I have been fascinated by it for years, and I have several books on how to make chocolate showpieces. Making a chocolate satellite should be quite simple, since our satellites are basically rectangular boxes. Here’s a photo of SkySat-1, in our clean room:

As you can see, it’s a rectangular box with solar panels on the sides, and a door that opens with a saucer and gold doohickey sticking up from the saucer. That is relatively simple to build. The only tricky part is supporting the open door on the satellite. I will probably tip it over onto its side, which will allow the door to be supported by whatever goes underneath the satellite. (Most likely an 18″ x 24″ baking sheet, but possibly something more rigid, like a sheet of marble.) I’ll still have to buttress the back of the door, but that should be fairly easy.

I am, of course, full of ideas for decorating the satellite – I want to put a Skybox logo onto the side in Google colors, and I have some other cool ideas for making the solar panels. I’ve ordered some supplies, including 46 lbs of chocolate, and will be prototyping some of the decoration ideas later today, once Mike gets up and I can use the tempering machine. I’m also going to take another stab at making my own chocolate transfer sheets – I want five or six sheets with the Skybox logo on them, as I’m thinking of making some chocolates to accompany the satellite. That is an “extra”, though – I’ll only do it if I have time and if I can screen print the acetates successfully. I’m not really bullish on my prospects since I wasn’t terribly successful last time around, but it’s worth trying.

Of course, I also have twelve pounds of cherries and three pounds of rhubarb to convert into jam, so I can’t simply play with chocolate all day. But that’s OK – I’m mostly testing techniques right now. The bulk of the work will be done over the July 4 holiday weekend, when I am praying it will be cool enough to work with chocolate.

Off to do more satellite sketches! This is a really cool project and I’m excited to be working on it.