Creativity in Orbit: How Astronauts Make Art in Space

Art makes every human alive and allows all of us to connect with our inner soul, whether on Earth or beyond. 

To honor National Poetry Month celebrated in Canada and the United States, we celebrate and remember the power held by creative pursuits and how art can be so magical that its ripples from Earth reach even the universe. Below, we dive into a brief history of this month’s theme, and some notable astronaut-artists whose work lives on. 

National Poetry Month

Whether you’re a student or teacher, publisher or poet, writer or bookseller, National Poetry Month represents a special moment of reunion to share the importance of poetry and one’s passion for writing. 

The decision to celebrate the art of poems started in New York in 1996 through the effort of the Academy of American Poets and later in Canada in 1998 thanks to the League of Canadian Poets. These two non-profit organizations had from the beginning the same aim, which is supporting the poets and protecting the interests of writers during their careers and their growth. 

Chris Hadfield

Through the years, astronauts have demonstrated how to explore not only galaxies and stars but also new layers of creativity. 

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, famous for multiple reasons. Firstly, he is the first Canadian astronaut who walked in space. Additionally, he became a famous songwriter and singer after creating an entire album in orbit. The first song he recorded in orbit was Jewel in the Night, published on Youtube for Christmas Eve in 2012. In early  February that year, he also performed Moondance live from the International Space Station with the group Chieftain.

A year later, he wrote a song called Is Somebody Singing, with the collaboration of the Canadian group Barenaked, which was broadcasted on CBC Radio and distributed online.

In 2015, he announced on Twitter the release of his first album completely recorded on ISS, called “Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can”, including eleven songs written by himself and the cover of the famous David Bowie song, Space Oddity. The album was composed on ISS, where Hadfield had been for nearly five months during the Expedition 35.

The musician improvised a record studio inside the station and he only used GarageBand to perform and edit his work. Many of his songs were influenced by R&B, narrating the experience of a man who feels fortunate to have observed life beyond the planet Earth. In an interview with the National Public Radio, Hadfield declared that “The big pervasive feeling onboard looking at the Earth is one of tremendous exquisite privileges that it exists. It's like a huge yawning endlessness on your left side and you're in between those two things and trying to rationalize it to yourself and trying to get some work done.”

He used a guitar given by the psychologists of NASA, who consider music and art as fundamental activities for mental health. The guitar was a Larrivée Parlour, brought on the shuttle’s station in August 2001. From that moment, many astronauts played the guitar for their music.

Hadfield was also part of a rock band, Max Q, and all of its members were astronauts-musicians. For him music is an extension of life and the earnings from the album have been used to sustain musical schools in Canada.

On May 12, 2013, after leaving command of the ISS, Hadfield recorded a music video aboard the International Space Station, the first ever filmed in space, in which he reinterprets David Bowie's Space Oddity. 

During an interview for the Guardian, he said that this song changed his life forever: “When I was on board the space station, there was a clamouring on the internet for me to cover Space Oddity by David Bowie. My son said: Just do it, Dad, or you’ll regret it forever. I had to get Bowie’s permission and he said it was the most poignant version ever. Millions of people have seen my version and it put laughter and joy in the face of David Bowie in the last couple years of his life. So that changed my life.”

The synergy between NASA and art

NASA took on various  art-related initiatives throughout the years. Their love story started in 1962, after five years of NASA’s foundation. The administrator James Webb engaged artist James Dean to start a project with the aim to include artists that could represent the agency in a creative way. 

According to James Webb: “Important events can be interpreted by artists to give a unique insight into significant aspects of our history-making advances into space.” 

James Dean reached out to the Hereward Lester Cooke, a curator in the National Gallery of Art in the U.S. to start this journey. Artists could have success with private documentation, including data about launch and landing activities and meeting with scientists — these creative minds could offer a new perspective about NASA’s activities, further than objective, strictly-scientific information. 

The Art Space program allowed artists to expose their creation at the National Gallery. 

In 1965, the 70 paintings and 15 drawings that were created to represent L.Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 missions – who completed 22 orbits around the Earth – were assembled in anexhibition called “Eyewitness to Space.” That exhibition was so successful that a second one was launched for the Apollo Mission in 1969. 

This initiative refers to a piece of music created by the composer Charles Dodge, who half a century ago, created a melody called Earth’s Magnetic Field, intersecting physics and music and computer programming. In 1970, after finishing his PHD in the use of computers to synthesise sound, he composed a melody based on NASA data, in collaboration with a group of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space studies, who notated the fluctuations in the magnetic field surrounding the Earth caused by solar wind. The data was presented like musical notation — or musical diagram — and the scientists wanted to hear the diagram of the magnetic field and contacted Dodge to convert the scientific data into a melody. He started from a sequence of numbers who analysed the variations caused by the solar wind on Earth’s magnetic field, and mixed them to create a musical sound.

When astronauts weave poetry 

On 31 March 2009, Japanese engineer and astronaut Wakata Koichi wrote the first poem ever written by a human being in space. Wakata Koichi was shown on the computer monitor at JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, at the Tsukuba Space Center. From the International Space Station, called Kibo or “Hope” in Japanese, the astronaut-poet held up a piece of paper, wrote on it, and then turned the paper to the camera and read his poem called “Afloat in the darkness before my eyes.” 

The path of artists in orbit doesn't stop here. 

Image credits: NASA.com

On Dec. 14, 1972, American astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Jack Schmitt exchanged songs with Mission Control in Houston, during the last day of Apollo 17 and their brief stay on the lunar surface. 

Having been inspired by Christmas, Schmitt sang to Mission Control his adaptation of “The Night Before Christmas.”

Additionally, after his return from the Apollo 15 Moon mission in 1971, American astronaut Alfred M. Worden shared the experiences lived with his crewmates by writing poetry. 

Two years after reading a selection of his poems to the Poetry Society of Texas in 1972, he published his collection of poems in a book entitled “Hello Earth: Greetings from Endeavour” — Endeavour was the name of the Apollo 15 Command Module. The work remains the only book of poetry written by an Apollo astronaut. Worden’s words gave us a glimpse into the experience of spaceflight and of traveling to the Moon and back.

Art is fundamental for creative expression: it is a primary need in order to connect with our emotions and during moments of change and to document the human experience. Being an astronaut far away from home while having to embrace a massive transformation from ordinary life on Earth can be disastrous on an emotional level. Choosing ways to stay creative on the ISS and during the missions inside the universe is a fundamental role that astronauts accomplish in order to stimulate these positive thoughts, balance mental wellbeing, and to feel the rainbow of emotion that only human beings can live.

Yours truly,

Alice Coppini

Writer, Writers Team