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Spaceship Earth, that 175-ton sculpture that made an aborted effort to land in Berkeley, has died a premature death in Georgia, giving headline writers and bloggers everywhere endless occasions for schadenfreude. 

The opus, a monument to Berkeley-born environmentalist David Brower, was waved away in Berkeley as too massive and both environmentally and politically insensitive. 

Commissioned by the late PowerBar millionaire Brian Maxwell and spouse Jennifer, the million-dollar creation was championed by Mayor Tom Bates, a friend of both Brower and the Maxwells. 

Commissioned to devise a suitable monument to the environmentalist, Finno-American sculptor Eino created a life-size bronze Brower astride a 15-foot globe crafted form 350,000 pounds of blue Brazilian quartzite adorned with the planet’s islands and continents in bronze bas relief. 

The Maxwells first tried to get San Francisco to take the Brower-bedecked orb, but a San Francisco Arts Commission committee rejected the work, labeling it “extremely grand and flamboyant,” devoid of “sensitivity to environmental issues.” 

That latter point may reflect on the fact that the stone is gouged from the earth of a fast-vanishing rain forest. 

Rebuffed, the Maxwells redirected their pitch across the bay, where they found willing ears in the Berkeley mayor’s office. 

“It’s a gem,” said Bates at the time. “I’d be very proud to have it here in the city of David Brower.” 

But the city had already given its blessing to one monument — the still-to-be-built David Brower Center on Oxford Street — and members of the Civic Arts Commission greeted the would-be gift with somewhat less enthusiasm than the Trojans once greeted a certain equine sculpture. 

“How would you like to have a 350,000-pound political football tossed in your lap?” said then-Commissioner Bonnie Hughes. 

Then there was the figure of Brower himself, a bronze marching across the North America with his right arm outstretched in a gesture eerily reminiscent of a similar hand-thrusting very popular in Germany during the 1930s. 

Complained one citizen to Berkeley’s Civic Arts Commission, “Oh great, that’s just what we need—another white man dominating the globe.” 

On a split vote, commisioners gave their reluctant approval after Eino and the Maxwells agreed to move Brower from globe-trodding stance to a more contemplative pose, sitting to one side away from the sphere, contemplating its majesties. 

But even then, the commission couldn’t find a single neighborhood in the city willing to house the 15-foot sculpture, its pedestal and a newly benched Brower. 

The city’s waterfront commission also panned the piece, and the thumbs of UC Berkeley officials and the East Bay Regional Parks District turning similarly downward. 

Frustrated, Jennifer Maxwell—her spouse had died after the work was commissioned—accepted an invitation from Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, Ga., where students and faculty had been awed by a presentation Eino had made earlier when he thought his piece was still San Francisco-bound. 

So the artwork—1,426 pieces of bronze and a collection of polished blue stone wedges—was trucked to Georgia and assembled on the campus, with the Brower figure back on top. 

To add to the grandiosity of the moment, the university added a time capsule, “sealed for 1,000 years” and, according to the university’s website, containing “articles, essays, and answers to the question, ‘What can we do to save Planet Earth?’” 

So the massive creation was finally assembled under the gaze of a live web camera outside the KSU Social Sciences building, where it was unveiled three months ago to great fanfare. 

And then Wednesday it all fell apart, burying the bronze Brower in blue debris, his arm reaching plaintively skyward like a bombing victim trapped in rubble. 

“Kind of ironic,” university employee Mary-Ellizabeth Watson told the Atlanta Jorunal-Constitution.  

Indeed. 

Headline writers had a ball, peppering newsprint and weblogs with their witticisms.  

• “Fragile Earth collapses in irony,” declared the Metro, Britain’s equivalent of USA Today. 

• “The parlous state of the world,” headlined the blog secrets & lies. 

• “Earth-Shattering” read the head in the Winston-Salem Journal. 

• “Ever Get the Feeling the World is Falling Apart?” asked the blog Yippee-Ki-Yay! 

• “Iron ‘e’” declared blogger Joe Givens. 

• “Talk About Atlas Shrugging,” trumpeted the Compass, blog of the Sierra Club—an organization which once numbered Brower among its leading luminaries (he later quit and founded the rival Earth Island Institute). 

• And leave it to the London Times to declare, “End of the world as we know it as Earth sculpture collapses.” 

Meanwhile, Eino told the Georgia paper he’s ready to put his sculptural Humpty Dumpty together again, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told the Journal-Constitution they’re working to see if foul play was involved. 

Maybe, however, it was just a foul ball.