Scoperto oggi via BlueSky: Superman venne impiegato come “testimonial” di HST - al tempo Large Space Telescope - per mostrare al Congresso, poco favorevole a finanziare il progetto, che l’opinione pubblica era ancora interessata alle “cose spaziali”.
Ideatore di questa iniziativa fu Pete Simmons, Director of Space Astronomy alla Grumman Aerospace Corporation.
Il thread su bsky comincia qui:
(nota: le date citate nel thread e nell’intervista potrebbero essere imprecise; l’albo è del '72, ma almeno stando a wiki HST venne definanziato nel '74)
e mostra anche la copertina dell’albo (Action Comics 419) e alcune strisce con Superman e il Large Space Telescope:
La storia è raccontata dallo stesso Simmons in questa intervista. (per il video serve VPN con indirizzo USA, altrimenti c’è una trascrizione molto imprecisa)
I was going from Washington to LaGuardia airport and there was a little kid sitting in the seat next to me, he was reading a Superman comics and I thought “Gee you know those are pretty popular”. And I got off the airplane and I bought an Action Comics and find who the publisher was, who happened to be an outfit in downtown Manhattan.
So the next day I called the publisher and I told them my problem, that the large space telescope was not popular, nobody was talking about it on the streets, Congress wasn’t going to fund it, what a great loss that would be and could they help us?
Well, they sent a crew of people out that very afternoon and they got pictures of the artist concepts of the large space telescope, got pictures of the artist concepts of the Shuttle - the Shuttle had not been built yet - and they took these back and they wrote the whole article about Superman. And it shows Clark Kent on the first story, in the first page, just shows Clark Kent talking to Lois Lane and he says “I’m in orbit with NASA’s LST, the large space telescope”. […]
We gave every member of Congress a copy of this Superman comics and I remember asking as many as I could find “If I can get the large space telescope talked about in Superman comics, do you think is popular enough?”