We Didn’t Need Spacesuits, Just Cardboard

AS you might imagine after reading the past few posts, I’ve got Mars on the brain. It’s almost genetic, but not quite. Back when I was a kid, living on a farm in Boulder, Colorado, we had a game we played. I don’t remember the name of the game, but let’s call it “Going to Mars.” This was back before we’d landed folks on the Moon. I’d read somewhere about Mars and since the solar system was in the news, I’m guessing we decided to make a game of it.

We got a big cardboard box and put it out in a field. That was our rocket. We stood in it and made lots of rocket noises like we’d heard on TV during launches. And, after a while, we somehow landed on Mars. Never mind that Mars was basically an alfalfa field. To us, it was Mars. And we explored our Mars and found all kinds of cool things.

When I was a few years old, I read the first of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars and found out that John Carter basically got to Mars by standing in a cave and teleporting himself there. Very cool… we both got there by imagination, which is great.

Well, about a decade ago, I shared that childhood game with the world in the form of a planetarium show called SkyQuest. It’s about a little girl who grows up to be an astronomer and how she played astronaut games as a child. There’s a short sequence in the show where she builds her rocket and goes to Mars, but most of SkyQuest is about her interest in the stars and planets.

In a way, the show parallels some of my life story, and I’ve had many planetarium folk tell me that it reminded them of cardboard rockets and space exploration games they played as kids, too. What this tells ME is that we need both science education AND imagination to make future astronomers and astronauts

A still from SkyQuest, which we created for

the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the

Smithsonian’s National and Air and Space Museum.