Sixteen for Psyche
Addison Mayhew
Major: New Media Design
Genre/Medium: Poetry, Collection assembled in Adobe InDesign, art made in Procreate
About the Work:
Sixteen for Psyche is a poetry collection structured around the phases of NASA’s Psyche mission, tracing a progression from engineering design to interplanetary travel to orbital encounter. The work draws from the language of systems engineering, trajectory analysis, and mission operations, using procedural and technical vocabulary as both structure and subject.
The collection is divided into three sections—Constraint, Persistence, and Exposure—each reflecting a phase of the mission and a corresponding shift in poetic form. In Constraint, highly structured poems mirror the rigor of design reviews, testing, and launch preparation. In Persistence, the work transitions into free verse, reflecting the long-duration continuity of spaceflight, where motion is gradual and cumulative. In Exposure, the poems become increasingly experimental, destabilizing form and language as the spacecraft reaches Psyche, a metallic asteroid believed to be the exposed core of a protoplanet.
Although individuals are not named within the poems, human presence is central to the work. Every calculation, tolerance, and decision originates from teams of engineers, scientists, and operators whose labor makes the mission possible. The procedural language throughout the collection functions as a record of that collective effort—structured, iterative, and precise. Repeated phrases such as “we attempt the core” reflect a shared voice rather than a singular one.
Each section is introduced by a full-page illustration that acts as a visual anchor for the poems that follow. These images are atmospheric and symbolic rather than diagrammatic, translating the section themes into visual form: structured ascent in Constraint, sustained motion in Persistence, and radiant interior revelation in Exposure. Together, text and image reflect both the mechanics of the mission and the scale of what it seeks to understand.
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