Space Shuttle - in Culture

In Culture

Space Shuttles have been features of fiction and nonfiction, from movies for kids to documentaries. Early examples include the 1979 James Bond film, Moonraker, the 1982 Activision videogame Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space (1982) and G. Harry Stine's 1981 novel Shuttle Down. In the 1986 film SpaceCamp, Atlantis accidentally launched into space with a group of U.S. Space Camp participants as its crew. The 1998 film Armageddon portrayed a combined crew of offshore oil rig workers and US military staff who pilot two modified Shuttles to avert the destruction of Earth by an asteroid. Retired American test pilots visited a Russian satellite in the 2000 Clint Eastwood adventure film Space Cowboys. In the 2003 film The Core, the Endeavour's landing is disrupted by the earth's magnetic core, and its crew is selected to pilot the vehicle designed to restart the core. The 2004 Bollywood movie Swades, where a Space Shuttle was used to launch a special rainfall monitoring satellite, was filmed at Kennedy Space Center in the year following the Columbia disaster that had taken the life of Indian-American astronaut KC Chawla. On television, the 1996 drama The Cape portrayed the lives of a group of NASA astronauts as they prepared for and flew Shuttle missions. Odyssey 5 was a short lived sci-fi series that featured the crew of a Space Shuttle as the last survivors of a disaster that destroyed Earth.

The Space Shuttle has also been the subject of toys and models; for example, a large Lego Space Shuttle model was constructed by visitors at Kennedy Space Center, and smaller models have been sold commercially as a standard "LegoLand" set.