The Society for Speculative Rocketry brought fifteen participants together to build imagined payloads for model rockets. Developed with Sascha Pohflepp, its inaugural meeting took place at Eyebeam in New York on 15–16 March 2014. The workshop connected historical visions of space travel with the futures participants wanted to propose through objects.

Eyebeam became a temporary situation room, with projected views of the Pacific Ocean evoking the RAND Corporation’s headquarters in Santa Monica. Working from materials including Rockwell’s 100-year plan, participants developed scale models of spacecraft and related artifacts, both real and fictional. The guided speculation drew on Extrapolation Factory’s practice, and each participant produced at least one payload intended for a functional model rocket.

At the end of the workshop, Karen Lau of SpaceX and Morgan Hendry of NASA JPL joined a video call to review the proposals. This invited exchange brought the participants’ speculative objects into conversation with people working in the space industry.

The following day, the group embarked on a trip to Robert H. Goddard’s historic launch site in Auburn, Massachusetts, intending to launch the rockets and their payloads. Timed to the 88th anniversary of his first liquid-fueled rocket launch, the journey connected their imagined futures with an earlier experiment in spaceflight.