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The space shuttle Atlantis completed its final flight last month, bringing pride and bittersweet nostalgia to many Americans. But what about our beloved, symbolic astronaut? What will he do now that he’s out of the hero business?

Piggy-backing on the mixed emotions of the country about the end of NASA’s space shuttle program, photographer Neil DaCosta and art director Sara Phillips produced a darkly comic project by staging fictitious last moments of a distraught anonymous, unemployed astronaut.

“The concept came about after chatting about childhood aspirations,” says Phillips. “As a kid I remembered wanting to be an astronaut, it seems like that’s less likely to be on someone’s lips today.”

Be it funny or of questionable taste, Astronaut Suicides not only reflects on the end of a childhood icon, but also taps into the anxiety many Americans are feeling over jobs, pensions and livelihoods since the economic downturn took hold three years ago.

“We wanted to acknowledge the end of an era in a visual way that would bring the conversation to the creative community,” says Phillips. “The incongruity of the astronaut in these situations is, we hope, compelling and humorous, and we hope that we’re encouraging a younger audience to pay attention to what’s going on.”

In February, President Barack Obama’s budget announcement signaled the end of the shuttle program in order to “focus instead on radically new space technologies,” bringing added significance to Atlantis’ last launch and final landing.

“I understand that some believe that we should return to the surface of the moon but I have to say this bluntly, we have been there before,” said Obama on April 15, 2010.

Obama’s pragmatism is in sharp contrast to the Cold War era rallying of John F. Kennedy who, on Sept. 12, 1962, orated:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

“We were inspired by JFK’s historic speech at Rice University which speaks to the achievements and aspirations of the times, and to recognize that the power of the sentiment is still relevant today,” says Phillips.

DaCosta and Phillips shot the project in Portland, Oregon, over two days, using a suit sourced from a Hollywood prop house that supplies replica space suits to the film industry.

All photos: Neil DaCosta