The show draws strength from Chicago architect Doug Garofalo's evocative, otherwordly exhibit design, which lines the museum's horseshoe-shaped architecture gallery with silvery polyester on one wall and a bent steel skeleton on the other. Space artifacts sit atop curvy wood pedestals, which resemble little creatures. The exhibit also envelops us with space-related sounds. At the beginning, we hear a piped-in recording of a countdown and launch sequence. At the end, there's an astronaut's heartbeat, a reminder that being out on the frontier can be excruciatingly lonely.
Architecture helps give our bearings.
The globelike domes of planetariums and observatories echo the shapes of the planets even as they facilitate the functions they house. In a perfect symbol of the Cold War's superpower standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, one display case in the show houses a collection of miniature white rockets lined up directly opposite a collection of miniature black rockets, with only a line between them, like a line drawn in the sand. Politics further colors our vision of space. To Americans, that very same red ball was a symbol of fear, a reason to think that they might lose control of space, and thus, control of the world. One of the show's most memorable images is the cover of an American scouting magazine, which depicts a young scout watching the Soviet Sputnik satellite whiz threateningly over an American city.