The night sky has always been a source of immeasurable wonder for humans here on Earth. This fall, two new picture books explore the curiosity, science, history, and art behind some distinctive missions—each with a very special payload—to the final frontier: outer space.
Under Where?
Author-illustrator Jonathan Roth’s fascination with space exploration dates back to his elementary school days. “When I was a kid, the first picture that was taken on the planet Mars by a lander—[NASA’s] Viking 1 in 1976—was on the front page of the newspaper,” he recalled. “I remember seeing that and thinking, wow, those are little rocks and pebbles on another world. It kind of blew my mind.”
Fast forward to 2021, and it was another pivotal newspaper article that inspired Roth’s Almost Underwear: How a Piece of Cloth Traveled from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and Mars (Little, Brown/Ottaviano). In a feature in the Washington Post, Roth learned that NASA’s Perseverance rover, sent to Mars, was carrying a stowaway—a small experimental rotorcraft named Ingenuity, designed to be the first craft to fly on another planet. When Ingenuity was deployed on the Red Planet, “only then did NASA reveal that they had stuck a postage-stamp-size piece of the original wing cloth from the Wright Brothers’ first plane, [the 1903 Wright Flyer] underneath a cable on Ingenuity,” Roth said. “The minute I heard that, it set off a spark, and I knew I wanted to write about it.”
That spark for a book idea quickly grew because Roth was already familiar with the Flyer—and its rich history. “I live outside of Washington, D.C., and I go to the [National] Air and Space Museum a lot,” he noted. “Probably the most iconic thing in there is the Wright Brothers’ Flyer,” Roth said. “And that is the original plane, except for the biggest part of it: the muslin cloth that covers the wing is actually a replica.” But, also on display in the museum, Roth pointed out, is a small swatch of the plane’s original wing cloth that Neil Armstrong had taken to the moon on his Apollo 11 mission in 1969. As the lore goes, the Apollo astronauts were permitted to bring a few personal items on their missions, and, according to Roth, “a lot of them packed things they could sign and sell later. But Neil Armstrong was a very good steward of being the first person to walk on the moon, because what he took along was a piece of cloth and a tiny piece of wood from the Wright Flyer. He recognized that his mission could only be possible because 66 years earlier, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane.”
For Roth, the revelations about Ingenuity brought things full circle. “I thought, oh, wow, there’s a linear path between the first airplane and the first moon mission, and now the first flight on Mars—and they were literally all threaded together by a piece of old cloth that improbably was there for all three,” he said. “I just thought that would be an interesting way to introduce the history of flight to kids.” With that, Roth created a “quick dummy” to send off to his agent Natalie Lakosil, then at the Irene Goodman Agency, who placed it with Little, Brown’s Christy Ottaviano Books.
But what does any of this have to do with underwear? “The book has a lot of jumping off points educationally,” said Roth, who is an elementary school teacher by day. He believes it can be used to inspire students and teach them a hidden, fun part of history, but also one of the bigger ideas about technology. A key example of this comes from Roth’s own research. “When the Wright Brothers built the first airplane,” he said, “they couldn’t just go to the airplane parts store, right? They had to go to a department store in Dayton, Ohio, and buy some cloth [muslin], which I learned was commonly used to make women’s undergarments—so, underwear,” Roth said. When he came across that tidbit, he said, “There’s my hook.” This kind of information can get kids thinking about “the fact that all technology comes from earlier technologies,” he added, the same principle embraced by NASA, Armstrong, and scientists, engineers, and inventors everywhere.
As the finished book launched in August, Roth found things coming full-circle once more, when he held his initial signings at both National Air and Space museums—in Washington and Virginia. “In D.C. they set a table up just steps away from the Wright Brothers’ plane,” he said. “That was a dream come true.”
Looking ahead, he hopes to hold additional events in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, “places where they’re very big on this aspect of history.” He wants readers to discover the thread of history that ties these events together and its importance as an act of commemoration. “It’s also about the interconnectedness of human accomplishments, and that in 118 years, we went from the first airplane to the first flight on Mars,” he said. “That’s not very much time, so it’s pretty inspirational.”
Poetry Blasts Off
When NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft launches on October 14, it will be tricked out with sophisticated science instruments that will enable it to investigate Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, to see if it’s inhabitable. But the spacecraft will also be carrying something unique: an original poem handwritten by U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur fellow Ada Limón—“In Praise of Mystery”—is etched on Europa Clipper’s inward-facing vault plate. The plate additionally bears a small silicon chip containing the etched names of more than 2.6 million people who cosigned Limón’s poem, as part of NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign.
If this sounds like the stuff of picture books—now it is. Norton Young Readers is releasing In Praise of Mystery, illustrated by fellow MacArthur grant recipient Peter Sís, in celebration of the Europa Clipper launch.
NASA specially commissioned the poem from Limón in 2023, which she considered an enormous honor, but also a source of some trepidation. “I was struggling with the many drafts, and I kept thinking about, what do you say about Europa, or what do you say about where it’s going, or space?” she told PW. “I realized very quickly that what I really needed to do was say something about this earth, and that’s where the poem suddenly began to take shape—the idea that whatever we send out is really for us here, on this planet.”
Limón’s final version of the poem struck a chord with everyone she showed it to, and she recalls numerous people suggesting that it should be adapted as a picture book. “I certainly don’t have that expertise or skill,” she said. “But when I talked with my agent, Rob McQuilkin, he said, ‘Let’s see if we can get it done in a really beautiful way, working with one of the best illustrators.’ ” Limón thought it was a long shot but was on board to pursue that tack. “It was Norton who came to us and said, ‘I think Peter Sís is interested,’ ” she recalled. “When we knew that he wanted to do it, we all erupted in applause because we just love his work.”
Sís came to the project by way of Norton Young Readers publishing director Simon Boughton, who had edited Sís’s Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued (2021). Sís saw many connections in the pairing: he had illustrated poetry before, as well as a book about Galileo Galilei’s explorations, and he was enthusiastic about working with Limón, and the MacArthur connection they shared. “[Simon] sent me the manuscript, and I thought, ‘This is going to be hard,’ ” he recalled. “But it was so positive somehow. And I realized that after Covid and after [doing a] book about little children running away from Hitler, that I was desperately looking for anything that would be positive in my life.”
Another aspect that piqued Sís’s interest in the book was his own childhood fascination with all things NASA. “When I was a little boy in the communist country [Czechoslovakia], I had this picture of the Apollo astronauts from a magazine when they are standing in those blue spacesuits,” he recalled. “That was a symbol of America to me, that it was so advanced and beautiful, and NASA was the symbol of something awesome that nobody else has got. I could never, ever think that I would be there one day.”
Sís’s initial reaction to the scope of the book project—that it would be difficult—proved to be spot-on in a few ways. “I couldn’t quite see how to go about it, or how it could work as a book,” he said. His earlier career experience working in animation and as an editorial illustrator came in handy. “I started to make these long drawings where one thing would become another, when I went from the moon to the face, to the hand, to the tree—it had a continuity,” he said of the process. “I would imagine it almost like an accordion book, which you could pull out. There were these moments of the whole sky, all of space opening up, just so vast. And how could I compare that to a little flower in the field?”
As he puzzled through what the book would look like, Sís knew there was another consideration looming in the background. “There was a severe time limit on this,” he said. “From the beginning, they told me, ‘If you’re interested, you only have two months to do it,’ and it was over Christmas and New Year’s.” But Sís was keen to meet the challenge. “It really was continuous work for two months, but lots of joy in the end,” he noted.
Limón offers similar appreciation. “It felt like he was inside my own brain or my own soul,” she says of her reaction to the artwork. “There is so much of my inner world represented in that book. Especially the moment where all of those drops of water have the tiny trees in them—I just gasped,” she said. “To know me is to know my obsession with trees and so to have all of those little trees in these little drops of water is just really, really moving.”
Though the Europa Clipper represents the height of technological advancement, both Limón and Sís take pride in knowing they have created a tangible, Earth-bound item for a tech-savvy generation. “There’s something about the idea of the poem traveling so far away, and what could we keep here? What is left for us?” she said. “It’s sort of easy to let the poem travel and become more and more ethereal, but the book gives us an opportunity to share and exchange the poem here on this planet.”
When Sís first saw a finished copy, “I started to realize children might be excited about this without any electronic media,” he said. “I mean, they probably can follow the mission on the phone, but this is still a book made with hands and with paints, and I think kids could be inspired by it. That was another wonderful element of it.”
Limón added, “Even as we explore the outer worlds, and we stare at the stars and recognize that we’re part of a beautiful universe, the real wonders are here, and all of this is connected. That sense of wonder and awe and real cherishing of this earth is what I hope people will hold on to.”
Almost Underwear: How a Piece of Cloth Traveled from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and Mars by Jonathan Roth. Little, Brown/Ottaviano, $18.99 ISBN 978-0-316-52554-1
In Praise of Mystery by Ada Limón, illus. by Peter Sís. Norton Young Readers, $18.99 ISBN 978-1-324-05400-9
