Director's Notes - 161 - The Space Race (Patreon)

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

When I was 11 years old, my mother took me to Astrofest at the Pasadena Convention Center. The occasion was the landing of Sojourner, which carried Pathfinder, the lovable little Mars rover. I am not a convention person. Especially now, the idea of a convention gives me a headache and makes me want to take a nap. I have a joke with my agent that I will pay her $100 under the table for every year I don’t have to go to a ComicCon.

But for 11 year old me, Astrofest was a wonderland. It was a weird mix of JPL scientists doing panels on the future of near orbit space flights combined with actors from Star Trek selling signed photographs and aisle after aisle of artists who specialized in lurid paintings of the night sky as seen from the surface of various planets. These paintings were, I was told, completely scientifically accurate, but then how the hell was I going to check.

Finally the big event came. My mom and I sat in the auditorium, as a live feed from NASA was combined with a live feed of what the lander was sending back. Of course, all of this had actually happened some time before, because that’s how communication from Mars works, but it still felt like it was history happening in real time in front of me. I don’t think I’ve ever again in my life been as excited about a news event as I was that day. When the first photo from Mars arrived from the lander and slowly loaded onto the big screen, the crowd went wild and it felt to me like I personally had landed on Mars, like all of humanity had, like we were moving forward and nothing would ever be bad again.

I wish I could feel like that again, but I live in this world. Space has a way of bringing that out of us: the sense of wonder, the sense that we are all one species and our little differences don’t matter. But of course they do matter. And space in reality is just another place for us to go be human. We bring all of our flaws with us into space, and we always will.

Still, I have that residual love for the optimism of space people. My mom was a space person. She was obsessed with space exploration and she taught me to love it too. So I wrote this episode. It’s about space.

As in the real world, people in this episode are trying to go for space for all sorts of reasons, but as in the real world, some of those reasons are bad, and in any case the results are always mixed. As in the real world, Neil Armstrong is the first one on the moon, and, as in the real world, he encounters a secret lost pet city on the moon.

Sorry. Wait. Forget I said that last bit. You weren’t supposed to know that.

– Joseph Fink
February 6, 2020

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