The shuttle, which already had been introduced to the American public, was still two years away from its maiden voyage into space. But it still merited a starring role in the film. In the wall text, for example, the curator pointedly notes that architects and designers were ignored in the early U.S. space missions, in which astronauts were stuffed into cramped compartments. It was only with the development of Skylab in the late 1960s and early 1970s that NASA consulted the noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy to make spacecraft interiors more habitable. Recent designs have called for private compartments, exercise quarters and other features to make space stations more like a home away from home.
Studies show that there is a market for space tourism.
The show also breaks new ground in showing us the proposed inflatable structures, called TransHabs, that would create bigger living spaces on both space stations and the surfaces of planets like Mars. Zukowsky imaginatively compares the TransHabs to balloon frame houses, which were invented in Chicago in 1832, envisioning them spreading across the Martian landscape like so many suburban tract homes. But on the whole, the show is wonderfully lucid in its treatment of what easily could have been a baffling subject.