The Pop Culture of Space

The idea of living and working in space has acted as inspiration for stories for thousands of years. Dr. Margaret Weitekamp is a curator and chair of the space history department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. She joins host Sean Mobley to explore the many ways culture draws from the stars.

The Museum of Flight is a proud Smithsonian Affiliate.

Learn more about Margaret’s work: https://airandspace.si.edu/people/staff/margaret-weitekamp

Donate to The Museum of Flight: https://pages.museumofflight.org/flight-deck-donate

Cover image: National Air and Space Museum

Transcript after the player.

00:00:00

SEAN MOBLEY:       The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain the Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the Museum's other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast.

[Intro music]

SM:     Hello and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Sean Mobley. Dr. Margaret Weitekamp is the curator and chair of the space history department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The Museum of Flight is a proud Smithsonian affiliate. This season of the podcast is all about space stations, and Dr. Weitekamp joined me to share some excellent insight into the pop culture of space settlements. How have humans imagined living in space through the years? How has pop culture itself shaped real space exploration? And how can we bring our culture with us into space so that humans don't just survive, but thrive.

[Intro music]

SM:     Margaret, thank you so much for joining me on The Flight Deck today.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP:     Happy to be here.

SM:     I'm always curious about individual people's memories, so what is your first memory of looking up at the stars?

00:01:25

MW:    That is a great question. I grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania, and so I grew up in a really nice dark sky place and near national forests as well as national parks and so able to get outside. And I would say, kind of, Orion hanging in the sky, super clear, so that you can see not only the belts but all the rest of the stars of Orion in a nice winter sky, so on a cold day. And even being able to see the Milky Way would be something that I remember growing up with, and when I get to go back to where I grew up, it's something that I always try to get outside and see again.

SM:     Yeah. The skies are a little more overcast in the DC area.

MW:    We just live in an area with a little more urban light pollution added. Yeah.

SM:     So following that train, then, your interest in space, where did that begin? Did it start more in the science aspect, in the pop culture aspect? How did this form for you?

MW:    So I'm exactly the right age to be a Star Wars kid. That came out in 1977, and so I grew up as a Star Wars kid and became a Star Trek fan as an adult. But I was also growing up in the era of the Space Shuttle, and so I think there was a lot of emphasis in the schools on the Space Shuttle program. This was going to be the next generation vehicle that was going to be the vehicle that brought ordinary people into space. And I remember following along with the teacher and space program, and obviously the tragic loss of that mission in January of 1986 was a very searing moment for me, for a whole Generation X generation. So that's really where it started, I would say, equally in the fantastical and in the real, and I just saw a lot of connections as I became a scholar between how spaceflight had been imagined and how it had been executed.

00:03:34

SM:     It's funny you bring up Star Wars because, actually, one of my most distinct memories growing up, period, was visiting National Air and Space Museum when I was a kid. And they had an exhibit—I don't remember what it was called; you probably do—about Star Wars. It had like collectible—

MW:    Star Wars: The Magic of Myth. Yes.

SM:     The Magic of Myth.

MW:    The late 1990s.

SM:     Yep.

MW:    I was not working at the Museum yet. I came on board in 2004, but my brother and I both came to DC and made a point of seeing the Star Wars exhibit. There was a Star Trek exhibit in 1992 that was an earlier '90s exhibit, so the museum has always had this interest in how spaceflight has been imagined. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were a part of the exhibits that were built when the Museum's building on the National Mall opened in 1976. There were already all of those touches about how spaceflight had been imagined, and so that as much as cultural history is something that has really matured and that people have come to expect. It was something that was a part of the narratives that the museum was telling as early as the 1970s.

00:04:44

SM:     But at the same time, I find that sometimes people question, "Why tell those stories in a museum context?" kind of the more pop culture stories as opposed to the planes and the facts about the planes. Why do this? What is the point of having Star Trek exhibits, Star Wars exhibits? We just did an art exhibit here at the Museum of Flight last year that kind of used aerospace as the inspiration. Why do all that?

MW:    So that is the most common question that I get as a curator of social and cultural history at the National Air and Space Museum is, "Why"—and sometimes it has a greater "why" [emphasizing disbelief or disapproval]—kind of, "Why does the National Museum, with the preeminent collection of real aircraft and real spacecraft, some of the real milestones in the history of aerospace, also entertain or even put next to it some of these more fictional and sometimes rather fantastical visions?" And I always talk about the fact that the people who designed and build and fly the actual things are often fans of the fictional visions as well. It is a part where people get inspiration, and so those inspiration and imagination stories I think are part and parcel of the engineering and technical histories that we're also endeavoring to tell.

00:06:06

And we use the same tools to try to tell the cultural history stories as well, so if we're working on an artifact like the original 11-foot studio model of the Star Trek Starship Enterprise, that actual physical vehicle that was used in filming the 1960s television series, we're using the same conservation techniques on that artifact as we're using on any other real artifact. And so we see them as very intertwined. I see those artifacts as very much in conversation with one another, and I think it enriches the conversations that you can have. And it also perhaps grabs an audience who might not have necessarily brought themselves to see the real history, but might be interested in the imagined history and then will be themselves a part of that conversation about how do these speak to each other.

SM:     I mean, I was already bought into space by the time I visited the Star Wars exhibit. I think that was not my first time going to that museum, but, yeah, the people who—that is their bridge into the wider topic. Meet people where they're at, right?

00:07:19

MW:    Well, and we find that when we talk to the people who were on the creative side in the imaginative world, they're often big fans of actual aviation and spaceflight themselves and are trying to bring some of that engineering vision into making the imagined world seem very real. So some of the study of paint textures and how engines work or what—if this generation of this vehicle looks like this, then what would the next fictional generation of a fictional vehicle look like? How would it look like it had developed in the imagined world? That's often informed by people who are studying real generations of actual aircraft or real generations of actual spacecraft and thinking about how they bring those touches into the visualization of the imagination. So in the real execution of the imagined in television or film, you often have the creators of that really drawing a lot of inspiration from real artifacts that actually flew.

SM:     Yeah. Yeah. Our curator here, Matthew Burchette, he did a web series video about the influences of World War II aircraft on the design of Star Wars, and the Millennium Falcon is basically just the B-29 cockpit.

MW:    Yes.

SM:     And as the social media person for the museum, that's great low-hanging fruit for me. Those posts always do well when I put up just the B-29 cockpit, and I'm like, "Hey, check it out. It's the Millennium Falcon."

MW:    Yes.

SM:     And sometimes they're just lifted whole cloth, right? I think the X-Jet from X-Men, I'm not super familiar with that, but it's just the Blackbird. It's just the SR-71, and they put a different name on it.

00:09:01

MW:    Yes.

SM:     So I think another reason why maybe people have questions or are curious about these kinds of pop culture pieces is because they're used to—when they think of an Air and Space Museum, they think of a hangar full of big stuff, but these pop culture things tend to be small things.

MW:    Yes.

SM:     And that's the funny part, too, is I found that when people ask museum staff, "Oh, what's your favorite thing?" they expect us to give an airplane. But 90 percent of museum staff are going to say this little thing that's on a wall off to the side.

MW:    Yeah.

SM:     What are some small things in your collection, or do you happen to know what the smallest object in your pop culture collection might be?

MW:    Oh, that's a great question. We get asked a lot about biggest thing. I don't know the smallest thing. Probably, off the top of my head, I'm thinking of some Buck Rogers giveaways, really, that were from the 1930s where you could write in. And they tend to be small and light, kind of a little foldable piece of metal that you could bend into a ring or some other piece that you would—if you were listening to the radio program, you would have been instructed to write in, and then this is a small, light bit of memorabilia designed to make it inexpensive to mail to you through the post.

00:10:21

So, yeah, so a lot of times, these things are small, and I think often—I think of them as small-d democratic, right? They're the, kind of, most commonly-owned things. Part of what I always enjoy about pop culture or a toys case is the nostalgia factor, that you get people who stand in front of it and are pointing at shelf to shelf to say, "Oh, I had this," or, "My neighbor had that, and I always wanted it," or, "I knew a kid in my class who had this toy," or, "My uncle had that one."

And often the stories of aviation and spaceflight, not everyone is going to get to design or test or fly a real vehicle, but lots of us have mission patches or pins or coffee mugs or bumper stickers or t-shirts or ball caps. And if you're excited about aviation or spaceflight, those kinds of objects on the back of your laptop, on the side of your water bottle, decorating your desk, somewhere in your car, in a room, they come away that you show that excitement about spaceflight or about aviation. So I think they are a really vital part and complete the story that is told by the larger pieces of hardware and technology.

SM:     Well, and on that note, too, only a few hundred people have gone to space, but there's quite a few people here on Earth. And in a way, space is a blank canvas for artists and writers and people to explore. How have you found that that's maybe let people who have been excluded from some of that space exploration express themselves in ways and kind of insert themselves? I think of movements like Afrofuturism that have really grown and let different groups be like, "Hey, this is a way for us to also be part of this."

00:12:23

MW:    There's always been this very imaginative side to space. As you say, it can be a little bit of a blank canvas onto which people can, artists can project themselves and different ideas about their identity. And it's also been a gathering place. One of the things that we have covered in our exhibits about, say, the Space Shuttle is the way that thousands of people would flock to both the launches and the landings and want to be there in order to witness those spaceflight achievements and then often want to memorialize that with some physical thing that would be a piece of memorabilia of that from the—they had buttons that they used to identify folks who were coming to launches. And those become memorabilia in their own right as well as things that carry the mission patch design that the astronauts themselves were a part of putting together to memorialize their particular mission.

SM:     So moving away a little bit from, kind of, the imagined, I'm curious. You talked about the influence of the science fact. So what are some examples or some ways that you really see science fact showing up in designs for spacecraft, for space stations and things like that in pop culture?

MW:    Well, one vehicle that many people can imagine as they're listening to this podcast is the Star Trek Starship Enterprise, and that design as originated by Matt Jefferies in the 1960s was something that has been written about. Mike and Denise Okuda have argued that there's an aircraft logic to that innovative design of a spacecraft, meaning that when you look at it, the pieces seem to have a function. They convey visually what they would do. So the saucer section with a visible bridge on the top of it, the engines set back in the nacelles and away from where the crew compartment or the engineer compartment is. And that means that you've got a kind of visual sense of what's happening there, and that comes in many ways from Gene Roddenberry was a pilot.

00:14:40

Matt Jefferies had flown during the second World War as a navigator, I believe, and that experience of being on actual aircraft then translated into wanting to create an imagined vehicle that wasn't just a pointy rocket or an undifferentiated space flying saucer, but was in fact something that looked like it made sense and did a thing and conveyed how many people would be on it, that this was not just a single person vehicle but in fact something designed to carry not only a crew but lots of people in addition. So I think that becomes a design that draws on actual aviation experience and then, at the same time, sets a new standard. After that, pretty much every imagined design needed to have some sense that it was touching base with that kind of a reality of what would it look like on the inside and how would it work.

SM:     Yeah. I worked at a Boy Scout summer camp for almost 10 years, and they taught model making there, the merit badge. And one of the options for that is you could build your own model of a starship bridge, and it specifically says in the requirements for the merit badge, "As a reference, look at pictures of Naval ship and airplane cockpits and Naval ship bridges" and things like that. And, yeah, it really runs thick in the blood there. And you bring up Enterprise too. It's such a great example, right, of an imagined future with so much collaboration. And when I look at a lot of space pop culture, it's about groups and teams, whether they're working together for good or for bad. The bad guys get their day too. But at the same time when you look at real space exploration, there's so few people, right? A mission might have one person on it back in the early days and, I mean, there's only so many people on the Space Station now.

00:16:52

MW:    And yet I would say it's very much a team sport, right? They call it mission control for a reason. There's a lot of actual control and decision-making that's happening on the ground, right? One of the early innovations of spaceflight is that you, at the time, needed a lot of computing power in order to do space missions, but you would not have been able to launch that much computing power or that much simple decision-making power. So the idea is that you always have a mission control on the ground, which meant literally that the computers, back in the day when they filled entire rooms, would stay on the ground, and you would only bring so much of that computing power with you. But, also, we've almost never really had human spaceflight missions that have been without that connection to the ground.

In the Mercury Program, they went in and out of radio contact with the ground, but they were in continual communication as best as they could be, in and out, and an awful lot of time and energy and expense was taken in order to try to ensure as much ground support for even those very early missions making three or five or seven orbits around the Earth. And I think now what you find is a lot of emphasis on team. If you are on the International Space Station, you are part of a small group, but you're in continual conversation and communication with the ground. And then those people who are, kind of, all stuck together really need to be very good team players because it requires that in order to really successfully live in quite such close quarters with other folks. So it's always been very much a team effort and even if that team is sometimes very geographically dispersed.

00:18:54

SM:     You specialize in the pop culture we generate here on Earth, but in a future where maybe there are more people living and working in space, what do you think needs to be remembered to make sure that the human part of humanity goes up there and is maintained there in terms of culture?

MW:    Well, I think that NASA and now some of these other commercial spaceflight companies have had a high awareness of the need not only for crew cohesion but also for the mental health as well as physical health of crew members. And I think when we look back into space history, what you really see is that people want to bring with them into that spaceflight workplace touches of who they are, of their identity, and things that make it feel like home. So we find that parents bring pictures of their children, of their family. People very early on were bringing musical instruments as early as 1965. So you really only have the very first human spaceflight with Gagarin in 1961.

00:20:03

Gemini flight in December included bringing a small harmonica and a set of bells, and they had practiced "Jingle Bells" and, in fact, announced that they thought they had perhaps seen a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer in orbit above the North Pole and then played "Jingle Bells" from space. So very often through the Space Shuttle program into the International Space Station, you've got musical instruments on board. People bring music, whether it's now probably something that would be a solid state, but people used to bring CDs on board. We know that the Apollo astronauts were given a small cassette player/recorder and blank cassettes on which they were supposed to be transcribing notes that they would basically take an audio note to be transcribed later. They sat around a hi-fi system and made themselves a mix tape of music that they were going to want to listen to because they had been officially issued a cassette tape recorder/player.

And so the Apollo astronauts very quickly found a way to use that to bring that touch of home with them into space. So I think that we will expect, as people continue to live and work in space—the International Space Station has been continually occupied since, oh, what, Halloween of the year 2000? And so that longevity in space also comes with then wanting to bring some of those customs from home, whether that's food, whether that's music, whether that's communication with family. Those touches are really important for keeping people grounded and happy.

00:21:52

SM:     Yeah. One of the coolest things in our collection and, actually, this is—one of the very first episodes of the podcast is about this. It was about a mix tape that Pete Conrad brought up to Skylab—

MW:    Ah!

SM:     …which we've digitized, and it's actually in our Apollo exhibit. You can listen to Loretta Lynn say hi to the astronauts, and it's just such a jewel.

MW:    Hm-hmm. [Affirmative]

SM:     You mentioned Halloween. What an auspicious day to start inhabiting the ISS. [Laughter]

MW:    Yes.

SM:     But space stations are also—and space ships—are the setting for a lot of horror in fiction, and it's kind of—

MW:    Yes.

SM:     …in a way, low-hanging fruit because space is doing its best to kill you.

MW:    Indeed.

SM:     But, yeah, what have you encountered in terms of, kind of, the darker side of all that in your work?

00:22:39

MW:    Well, generally, space science fiction tends to be utopian. We're going to take the best of ourselves with us. We're going to open things up in brave new ways. Or often dystopian, some vision of we're going to take the worst of ourselves, that you would take some trait on Earth and either extrapolate it to its farthest conclusion, and that becomes the basis of a science fiction imagination or just taking some current problem and defamiliarizing it, putting it in that space setting and then having a fresh look at it. So it becomes a rich way for us collectively to kind of grapple with things that either our hopes for what will be possible or threats or concerns. And so you see that a lot in science fiction generally, that you kind of grab whatever is current.

So if you look back through toys in the 1940s, you'll see lots of atomic guns where the ray gun of the day is grabbing that atomic power. Right after the invention of the laser, you start to see laser or just those kinds of imaginations of not just a disintegrator ray weapon but specifically something that will say laser on it. The piece that I often bring up when I'm doing a talk that brings this point home very quickly for people is we all remember—it's not space-themed, but I think I can be forgiven that the original Spider-Man is bitten by a radioactive spider and gets his Spidey senses and spider powers.

And, of course, in the newer versions of those films, it's a genetically engineered spider. So we kind of grab the bits of science that are cutting edge, that we're a little bit concerned about, and grapple with that in these sometimes very imaginative, fantastical ways that allow us to get our arms around it and cope with that whether it's something that we hope for or whether it's something that we fear.

00:24:50

SM:     Do you see any specific patterns with that? I'm thinking about how there's arguments that have been made about—with superhero movies, that, kind of, pre-9/11 superhero movies, the superhero always saves the day before the bad things happen. Post-9/11, the bad thing has happened, and the superhero manages to minimize the damage. It's not really about space, but do you see patterns like that at specific moments in history regarding the space culture?

MW:    Oh, very much so, and I think that's why cultural historians in many ways do what we do because we're fascinated with the ways that not only high culture—operas or important plays, things like that—are products of their time and reflections of it, that that's why we have whole fields of art history looking at how fine artists have reacted to their moments and brought that into their work. But then also you can do that through television. You can do that through comic strips. You can do that through radio programs, through major motion pictures. And so the ways in which pieces of popular culture, even if they're about the future, are very much built in the now.

And so they are reflections of that not because they're some sort of magic mirror to the circumstances of the time, but because the people who were creating them were embedded in their time and are also perhaps, as artists, as creators, as creatives, thinking about how what's going on around them and how to react to that, how they can grapple with that and what it means. And so, yes, part of the fun of popular culture studies is always looking at what's going on in the '50s or the '70s or the '80s or now and how what we're imagining is very rooted in that time. It's perhaps not always obvious at the time, but looking back you get a little bit of a retrospective glimpse of where some of the contexts were.

00:26:59

We have a series of toys at the museum that are play sets from the 1950s. They came with little plastic figures that would allow you to act out a scene, and the space station tends to be basically a repainting literally of a toy that was originally a Western fort. So you can picture it having a little building in the middle and a little stockade around the edges, and the Western version of that would have that stockade painted or lithographed to look like logs. And in this case they would make it to look like something spaceflight. And I think there are ways in which—because those tend to be very oppositional, astronauts versus aliens, for instance, figures that you would play out.

And I think that speaks to a, kind of, Cold War moment when there was concerns about attacks from without and subversion from within, a kind of bifurcated worldview where you were worried about an us and a them in the midst of the Cold War, that geopolitical conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that was also between capitalism and communism but then, kind of, culturally between what was happening in the West and consumerism and what was happening in the Soviet Union and those affected countries. So that's a place where I think when I look at that playset, it speaks to a, kind of, larger cultural moment that is politically rooted but then also gets played out in even something that you might have set up on your kitchen table or on your living room floor and played with.

SM:     A lot of people know the big hits, the Death Star, the Enterprise. You've seen a lot of spacecraft in your work. What do you think are some of the unsung heroes of this in terms of influence on art, influence on space reality, or just culture in general?

00:29:04

MW:    Well, many of your listeners are not going to be surprised by this. I would say that sometimes it really comes from the real imaginers to then being something that's grabbed by fiction. So Gerard O'Neill was a physicist who did a, kind of, thought experiment and worked for a long time on the idea of really creating a sustainable space station that would be in the shape of a torus, [phonetic 00:29:28] which is basically fancy for donut, but the living on the inside of that. And you see a movie like Elysium and what they've done is kind of grabbed that same technical idea of what it would take to live and work in space in that sustained way and then added the, kind of, culture and storytelling pieces to that of what kinds of disparities might one find in a society that existed with that as a real thing.

So I think that sometimes when—if you're looking for what kinds of great examples of space station thinking, it tends to come in almost any real vision of being in space as soon as you start to imagine that you can really easily and fluently travel through space and from planet to planet. Then you start to imagine that you might be able to create for yourself these kinds of way [phonetic 00:30:27] stations that basically allow you to exist in some sort of orbit or in some sort of intermediate space between a planet or around a moon. And so it becomes a powerful vision for what humanity could do, but it also becomes a stage in a narrative sense if you're trying to create a fiction. It allows you to put any kind of characters you want in there and effectively lock the doors and make them all deal with each other.

00:31:01

SM:     Yeah. Yeah. Well, you'll really rile up any Star Trek fan by asking which is their favorite, but I know that Deep Space Nine is—

MW:    Yes.

SM:     …among the favorites of a lot of fans because it is very—they're just kind of there, and they got to deal with it.

MW:    Yeah. And there was an interesting moment in the 1990s where space stations became the conversation, so you ended up with a show like J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5. Deep Space Nine was on the air, and it's the same moment when the real-life United States and the new Russian Federation in the post-Soviet era are working on collaborating to create an actual International Space Station. And the differences there of trying to figure out how do you live and work in space collaboratively were substantial. You can't travel to another country and just plug your hair dryer or your computer or your phone in. You need a converter, right, so you've got systems that have different electrical systems. You have different languages. They are based in different alphabets, right, so Roman and Cyrillic.

00:32:20

And in that case, you literally had different standards for air composition and air quality, for how water functioned place to place. You had to think about how do you have the right kinds of emergency signage so that if something goes wrong, you can figure out what's going on. They were having to negotiate what language do you speak and just trying to figure out all of the many differences technically as well as culturally as well as politically that would be required to put those two space superpowers into functioning in that same space and then adding to that a real true international component of the European Space Agency. The Canadians were involved with a strong space program for a very, very long time as a partner in that. And so you have all of that coming together in the 1990s as well.

SM:     I'm sure a great graphic novelist out there could have a lot of fun with a modern take on this. It's got everything. It's got steampunk.

MW:    Yes.

SM:     It's all right there waiting for someone to just have some fun with it.

MW:    Very much so.

00:33:35

SM:     So let's just untether ourselves entirely from science as we get to the end here. But like we said earlier, space can be that blank canvas. A lot of what you've seen is very based in science. But can you think of an example of a space station or a spacecraft that is just so untethered from all of that and is just like this is a person who dreamed up something wild?

MW:    Well, I think there are things like the Dr. Who universe, right, where they've just made a narrative decision that they're not going to bother with it, right?

[Laughter]

MW:    It can look like anything, and it's kind of stuck looking like this blue box that would be very familiar in a British landscape. It's larger on the inside. So a TARDIS is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, and they've just kind of chucked all the rules about it needs to make sense. Where we earlier talked about how innovative it was to create the Enterprise design such that each piece visually conveys what it does, this is going to go in the complete opposite direction of no visible mean of propulsion. It doesn't make any sense. Ta-da! And we're just going to jump from there and have an awful lot of fun zipping back and forth through time.

And so I would think that's one of the powerful places where you could also just make a narrative decision as a creative person to just chuck all the rules all together and make it whatever people would want to see, and it allows us to do that. I've written a little bit about the depictions of speed in fictional worlds: light years, light speed, hyperdrives, things like that. How do you move across space? And J. Michael Straczynski, who famously—the creator of Babylon 5 as well as a writer on many other projects—wrote that basically they travel at the speed of plot, right?

00:35:46

Spaceships show up exactly when the writer needs them to, either just in the nick of time or just a bit too late. And it is because it is, in many ways, it's subject to the writer, and it's a narrative device that physically moves your characters from place to place and gets them where they need to be. So you can embed that in a universe where you care deeply about what the rules are, or you can embed that in a universe where you chuck all the rules and do what you want with that.

SM:     You mentioned the Apollo mix tape where we talked about music in space earlier.

MW:    Hm-hmm. [Affirmative]

SM:     If you were up in a space station, people on the—or in the Shuttle for sure, and they—sorry. Astronauts get to pick a song to be, kind of, their wakeup call every day.

MW:    Oh, yeah.

SM:     What would be your wakeup song?

MW:    I have a special place in my heart for "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles, written by George Harrison, and that seems like a great thing to wake up to.

00:36:51

SM:     Yeah, especially because the sun might already be up there.

MW:    Yeah. The sun would be up and down several times, a predictable number of times a day every time you're going around the Earth.

SM:     I like that. And it starts kind of quiet and slow and builds, so you get, kind of, that, "All right. Let's wake up."

MW:    Hm-hmm. [Affirmative]

SM:     Well, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to cover here or anything I haven't asked about?

MW:    I think we've done very well. I really enjoyed the exhibit at the Museum of Flight. I thought that it was a creative way to pull together all of these intersections between what's real and what's imagined and vice versa, how they each play into each other, and thinking about what could be next in terms of human habitation whether that's around the Earth or whether that's at a Lagrange point or whether that's at the moon or farther. It's something that I think has been an engaging idea for a very long time and has just spurred a lot of creative thinking that is an awful lot of fun.

SM:     Margaret, thank you so much for your time today. This is such a fun discussion. I think we don't talk about it enough, so I'm just so glad that we had this conversation.

MW:    Thank you. This was a pleasure.

00:38:14

[Outro music]

SM:     Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. You'll find links to Margaret's book, Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and Imagined, in this episode's show notes, which you can find at museumofflight.org/podcast. The Flight Deck is made possible by the Museum of Flight's donors, everyday people who are excited about sharing these sorts of stories. Special thanks to all of you for your support. Now, if you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from, and please rate and review the show. It really helps spread the word. Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good Earth, we'll see you out there, folks.

[End of podcast]