Three spaceflight anniversaries, each separated by at the very least a decade, have a nexus, of sorts, in a comic book strip that ran in newspapers just over 20 years ago.
Today marks 60 years for the reason that first woman launched into outer space. On June 16, 1963, Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova lifted off on the Soviet Union’s three-day Vostok 6 mission. A 26-year-old amateur parachutist, “Seagull” (as was her call sign) circled Earth 48 times while coming inside 3 miles (5 kilometers) of Valery Bykovsky on board Vostok 5 and collecting the primary physiological data, to be compared along with her male counterparts.
It took one other 20 years (and two days) for the USA to catch up and fly its first female astronaut. Sunday (June 18) is the fortieth anniversary of Sally Ride becoming the first American woman to launch into space. A mission specialist on space shuttle Challenger’s STS-7 crew, Ride was a nationally ranked junior tennis player and physicist when she was chosen with five other women to hitch NASA’s astronaut corps.
Once in orbit, Ride controlled the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve a free-flying experiment pallet, which also captured the primary on-orbit “selfie” of the space shuttle orbiter itself.
Between those two milestones was the primary mission to Skylab, the USA’ first space station. Next Thursday (June 22) is the fiftieth anniversary of the primary landing from the orbital workshop, when Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz set a then-record of 28 days living and dealing in space.
So what does a 2002 black-and-white comic strip need to do with these three events? All of it comes all the way down to the imagination and knowledge — or lack thereof — of Johnny Hart.
A healthy history
In 1972, the 12 months before Skylab launched, NASA presented a public service award to Hart as creator of the comic strip “B.C.” and co-creator of “The Wizard of Id.”
Like illustrator Charles Schulz, who inspired Hart to start out his own strip and who loaned NASA use of Snoopy from “Peanuts” to function a security mascot, Hart did the identical, with characters from “B.C.” appearing within the Apollo 12 flight plan and on Apollo 13 press materials. Hart also drew original “B.C.” and “Wizard of Id”-style characters to advertise NASA’s crew health program.
One such poster shows two astronauts (resembling “B.C.” cavemen) standing inside their suit-up room when “Grog,” a hair-covered, much more primitive human is available in, yelling only his name. Says the astronaut standing closest to Grog, “I assumed secondary contacts weren’t allowed in here,” referencing NASA’s term for relations and others who were greater than once removed. “You tell him,” replies the opposite.
Hart’s reference to NASA continued through to Skylab, with “The Wizard” from “Id,” together with “Sir Rodney,” a knight, getting used on decals and other documents to attract attention to the work being done on the orbital workshop.
By the point Ride and the primary other women astronauts arrived at NASA in 1978, Hart’s characters had fallen out of use at NASA (very like Skylab would fall out of orbit the next 12 months). In actual fact, it might not be until 15 years after Ride left NASA that she would connect with Johnny — an anthropomorphic ant from “B.C.”
Forgotten first
The “B.C.” comic strip that ran on Sept. 25, 2002, opens with an exterior scene showing a small, hut-shaped constructing bearing an indication reading “Skool” and an American flag flying from a flag pole. From contained in the constructing, someone asks, “Who was the primary woman in space?” to which a reply comes, “Alice Kramden!”
Moving to the second panel, the view changes to contained in the hut, revealing that it’s a college for ants and the unique questioner had been Johnny’s teacher. “Flawed Johnny, it was Sally Ride!”
The comic strip ends again outside of the college, with the teacher adding, “…but a heck of a guess, kid.”
(For those missing the punchline, Alice Kramden, as played by actress Audrey Meadows on the 1955 sitcom “The Honeymooners,”was the wife to bus driver Ralph Kramden [Jackie Gleason], who would often threaten her with, “One nowadays, Alice, one in all nowadays… Bang! Zoom! You are going to the moon!”)
For those accustomed to space history, one may need thought that Hart was establishing one other joke or making some style of social commentary by giving full credit to Ride moderately than Tereshkova. When reached for comment just a few days after the comic strip ran, though, the cartoonist admitted that was not the case.
“Looks to me like little Johnny forgot to do his homework and so did big Johnny (Hart that’s),” wrote Hart in an email to collectSPACE.com back then. “The teacher has an obvious bias against the united statesS.R. — which not exists — so I suppose no one did their homework.”
“But what’s essential is,” Hart continued, “you probably did, and that is what keeps this ship on an excellent keel. Thanks for being attentive but mostly for bringing it to mine.”
Hence that’s how the Skylab comic strip artist, who once gave a shout-out to the primary American woman in space, was reminded of who was, the truth is, the true first woman in space. (Hart, 76, died of a stroke while working on his drawing table in 2007.)