What is the strangest thing ever shot into space?
Space. The final frontier. The undiscovered country. The great unknown. For all the gravitas we treat the expanse above the clouds, we haven’t half had a bit of fun with it, haven’t we?
From Alan Shepherd playing golf on the moon to that time Tim Peake got chased through the ISS by Scott Kelly in a gorilla suit, some wacky stuff has taken place up among the stars. As well it should, play is a fundamental part of humanity, and anything that gets more attention on space travel should be embraced. The more we view space as a terrifying void that we should stay the hell away from, the less time we spend learning about it and learning more about our universe as a result.
Arguably, the most fun we’ve had with the very concept of space travel is the things we have shot into space. Which makes sense. We can still learn from sending inanimate objects into space, and there’s a lot less risk involved than sending people or, in the most depressing stories of space travel imaginable, animals. Most of the time, they’re completely in service to the mission. Sending satellites, computers and readers into space to send data back to terra.
However, it’s in our nature to have a little fun. So alongside all that science stuff, we’ve sent Lego bricks and cars into space along with the aforementioned gorilla suit. Apollo 8 was due to take place over Christmas, so a fully-fledged Christmas dinner was sent up to their module. Two separate Star Wars props have been sent up to space, the first being a model BB-8 Droid from the sequel trilogy and the second being Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. Pizza Hut even sent some pizza into space, but due to corporate sponsorship laws, the NASA astronauts on the ISS were strictly forbidden from eating it. No man may have gone there before, but small print is everywhere.
The crown for the most silly thing shot into space, however, goes directly to the person who thought that getting Andy Warhol to sketch something to be sent into space was a good idea. They were totally right, but not in the way they probably thought.
What Andy Warhol drawing was sent into space?
The story goes that Forrest Myers, an astronaut on Apollo 12, the second manned flight to the moon, had the idea for what he called the ‘Moon Museum’, a tiny little tile that several of Earth’s greatest artists would put an even smaller work of art on, which would then be “exhibited” on the moon.
NASA immediately ignored Myers’ request, and while most could work out that they were going to deny him permission to complete his project, Myers decided instead that no answer wasn’t actually a “no”, so he got to work.
Myers got the work of six artists to add to his wafer-sized tile. Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Forrest Myers and, of course, Andy Warhol. Given that each artist had mere millimetres to work with, the works were barely more than line drawings, with Rauschenberg’s in particular being nothing more than a literal drawing of a line. However, tucked in the top left-hand corner is the only reason anyone remembers the ‘Moon Museum’.
Warhol swore blind that he had signed the Moon Museum with his initials, a stylised A and W. This is, fittingly enough, bollocks. Because anyone with a functioning pair of eyes can see that Warhol had drawn a cock and balls on the first piece of art ever exhibited on the moon.
We, humans, are a silly bunch, are we not?