Episode 05: Alma Thomas (Part 2) with Janelle Wellons

Written By Emily Olsen

Join Emily and Alexa as they chat with Janelle Wellons, Spaceflight Operations Engineer and Flight Director, about how the visual artist Alma Thomas' paintings resemble actual imagery from spacecraft, such as those captured by the Cassini and Mariner 4 missions.

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Music credit: "Space" by Music_Unlimited

Show Notes:

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Transcript:

[Intro Music: “Space” by Music Unlimited.]

Emily

Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I'm Emily Olsen.

Alexa

And I'm Alexa Erdogan.

Emily

After last episode’s primer on the visual artist Alma Thomas's work, today we have a special guest: Janelle Wellons, a spaceflight operations engineer, to talk about the intersections and similarities between how Alma Thomas was painting and actual images from space.

Alexa

Another housekeeping note before we begin: we'll be taking a brief mid-season break following this episode to take a little breather as July starts to get super busy. We look forward to resuming in August with more episodes for you! But in the interim feel free to check out our socials for updates on when episodes will resume.

[Interlude music: Space by Music_Unlimited]

Alexa

Today, we have an incredible guest joining us on the podcast to talk about things like Alma Thomas, spaceflight and more! Janelle Wellons is an MIT alumna and an aerospace and Spaceflight Operations Engineer whose past experiences span the breadth of several missions at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including Cassini, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Multi Angle Imager for Aerosols and more. And currently, she works as a Flight Director on lunar missions at a space company located in Tokyo, Japan.

Welcome to the show, Janelle. We're like so thrilled to have this opportunity to speak with you!

Janelle

Thank you both. It's really nice to be here with you, Emily, Alexa. Thanks for having me on your show. I always love a good opportunity to bring art into the world of space.

Alexa

Yes! So I guess just as like a foundation, you've worked on so many amazing projects and held some incredible positions. For folks who might be unfamiliar with what exactly a spaceflight operations engineer is, or even like a flight director compared to like a general aerospace engineer, could you elaborate on what those roles really entail?

Janelle

Sure thing. I mean, it's a good question. Even when I was offered my first job and I saw “Operations Engineer” in the title, I myself didn't even really know what exactly that was. And there’s a good reason for it, too. It's not often you get the chance while you're in college to have experience flying something in space. And at the end of the day, that's what the job amounts to. So when you see people in the Mission Control Center, they've got the headsets on. They're sitting in front of these monitors with plots of voltages, temperatures, currents, error codes. They're speaking to each other using standard comms, you know: “Copy, Affirmative, Negative.” Using these types of words – this is how we fly our missions. There's a human behind the scenes from the ground on Earth directing our spacecraft and the instruments– the scientific instruments we put on them to collect the data and complete the mission goals.

So my job as a spaceflight operations engineer is to do exactly that. And as a Flight Director who has a job of basically leading the team in these operations, I would call it…

It's a little bit like…you get a hit of adrenaline when you walk into the Mission Control on those critical days. And you know that you're about to do something really cool. Maybe that cool thing is you're going to do a maneuver, or you're planning for a landing, or you're going to see your spacecraft separate from the launch vehicle for the first time and turn on. These are the moments that really get your heart racing, and there's nothing like it except for just to go ahead and experience it yourself with the team in the Mission Control Center and do whatever it takes to get your spacecraft to its next goal.

Alexa

I love that description. Yeah, when I first heard of the term, like “Spaceflight Operations Engineer,” I also was not familiar with it. I was, like, familiar with space systems engineers, right? People who are building the satellites, but, yeah, I guess somebody has to run them too, right? Otherwise all that building is for naught. [laughs]

Janelle

That's right! That's right. And we often think that we can build the perfect robot, the perfect instrument, the perfect camera. But in reality, nothing in space ever goes exactly to plan. That's probably the only guarantee that you have. So my job is to work with all the people who designed this spacecraft, to engineer the spacecraft, learn as much as I can about those systems. To study them, honestly, like you're in school, really get to understand how this thing works. So that when it gets into space, it eventually does come across some kind of problem or anomaly, you're ready to tackle that problem with the information that you have.

Emily

That's so, so cool. And that explanation is so helpful. We previously have done an episode about NASA image processing, and to…we talked a little bit about spacecraft instrumentation. And it's so great to see another side of it, of just all of the different teams working with these spacecraft at different points in their missions.

Janelle

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Emily

I have a follow up question. So we found… we discovered your talk at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago where you were on a panel talking about the work of Alma Thomas at the Smithsonian and I was curious how you first discovered Alma Thomas's work, and what about her art really stuck with you, or maybe resonated with you based on what you've seen in your work?

Janelle

That's a great question. I really look fondly back on that panel that you're talking about with the Smithsonian. It was, honestly, my introduction to her and her work. You know, they reached out to me and basically said, “We know that you're a space engineer and art might not be your main thing, you know, but we're really interested in exploring the ways that art and science connect. Is there a connection there? Can we lean into it? Can we have meaningful discussions about it?” 

And so in preparation for that discussion, I studied the thing I knew the least, which was Alma Thomas and her works. And the more that I looked at her art, the more I said, “OK, Wow, she was certainly paying attention to what was happening at the time.” I mean, she has just..I don't know what is the right word to categorize her art. I don't know if abstract is the word or I don't know “imaginative?”  I'm not the expert in that world. But certainly for me, when I found myself looking at her various… like mosaic-like artworks in particular, it really elicited to me like this feeling of… you're depicting space or the sky, or the sunsets or the oceans. And it kind of gave me a similar feeling to how on one of my missions, I was operating the scientific cameras and it was such a thrill to come in to work and see all the commanding that we had done to capture these images, see what the result actually was. There's nothing quite like getting a glimpse at that first image when it comes down and getting to see that. Wow, like you're operating a real thing. And this real robot is out there, at somewhere like Saturn, capturing these fantastic like crazy images of moons, some of which look like straight up dumplings, and you're  “how does it get this way?”

Emily and Alexa

*laughter*

Janelle

And this is – this is real! Like, this is not an artist rendition! And certainly, I have to make sometimes… like give presentations or talk to students about these things. I have to let them know: “I want you to know this is real! This is not a sketch.” So it's really great to see how… how she interprets what we're doing out there, especially if there's no eyes or no – we haven't gone there before. There's no interpretation yet. She was able to find a way to describe it and elicit those same feelings of that wonder and excitement of seeing something in space.

Emily

Yes, I'm so glad that you talked about how these images are representative of space, but also the sky, because there's a painting I'm going to pop in the chat. It's called “Starry Night and the Astronauts.”

Emily

Thomas painted this painting in 1972, and it's at the Art Institute in Chicago. And actually, I think it was the first painting of hers that I had ever seen. And there's a quote that I think about pretty consistently when I think about her work. And she had said:

“I was born at the end of the 19th century, the horse and buggy days, and experienced the phenomenal changes of the 20th century machine and space age. Today, not only can our great scientists send astronauts to and from the moon to photograph its surface, but through the medium of color television, all can actually see and experience the thrill of these adventures.”

And that's such a great point–to your point, she's definitely paying attention. She's inspired by the technology of her time and the technology of her time is the space race. But she's also super interested in the technology and color intersecting, like color TV is a new phenomenon, and now more people than ever can see these images. But even before the Apollo missions, the space race included, like the lunar orbiters we're sending, were getting sent out– the uncrewed lunar orbiters were getting pictures of the Moon, and pictures of the Earth from the Moon, and sending that back to Earth so that we could scout out places for the Apollo landings. Similarly, like the mosaics of Surveyor, which landed on the moon and were pulling together these images that had to be pieced together into mosaics. So these technologies, contemporary to Alma Thomas, generated images in ways similar to how she's composing these paintings with those mosaics that you mentioned. And it always makes me think of her space paintings to see these Surveyor images and lunar orbiter images. But I realize– I mean, both of you guys are engineers, so you might have the other way around where the lunar orbiter images and those Surveyor images are what you think of when you see her paintings. So my art nerd’s kind of shining through here, where I'm way more familiar with her paintings.

But it's just so interesting to me that the way that the lunar orbiters were sending these images back in strips that had to be pieced together, and then the mosaics had to be tiled together. And that's very much what she's doing with color. And she does that too, with “A Glimpse of Mars,” which is a painting she made in 1969, which I will pop in the chat. 

Janelle

Thank you.

Emily

And that was inspired by the Mariner 4 mission to Mars. Yeah, would love…would love your thoughts on that, especially since you worked on the lunar reconnaissance at NASA.

Janelle

Yeah. So yeah, you were talking about the lunar orbiters. I think you're referring to the Ranger missions that were basically those early missions at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is where I used to work. They were basically saying, “Can we even hit the Moon? Before we send people to the Moon, can we even hit it? And, on the way down, get pictures. Send them back to Earth so we can kind of get a glimpse of ‘what does the lunar surface even look like?’”

I mean, these missions are kind of legendary at JPL. There's this tour that you can get if you ever go. It's a public NASA center. So actually anyone in the public can go and get a tour of JPL. You gotta apply in advance and everything, but it's a cool opportunity to walk around the campus. You can see what's being currently built in the clean room at the time. You can go and take a look at the spaceflight operations facility, which is where I worked and where the Mission Control was basically there.

And in this tour, you're going to learn about how these Ranger missions… well, there was more than one. Why was there more than one? Because it took more than one to actually succeed. I mean, this…if I had been on the teams that were in charge of this…1) I would have been sweating. I would have been panicking a little bit. The pressure was on. ‘Cause we're going to the moon no matter what. And if we can't even hit the Moon, how are we gonna send a person to the Moon? And 2)  it's like the problems sometimes were out of your control. One of them blew up on the launchpad. That has nothing to do with the actual spacecraft going wrong. And all your work, poof, just like that.

One of the missions– it actually hit the moon successfully, but never turned on the recording and sent back any data to Earth of what the Moon looked like. So, still not a complete success, but they did finally get it. And like you said, back then this was kind of… and you guys did an episode on image processing which is really great because I don't think many people realize that NASA played a big role in how image processing is done today, and how filters are done today, and where that technology really stemmed from. You did get back strips of these images because your bandwidth or your ability to send data over far distances with your limited technology, it wasn't that large, so you had to piece by piece put it together. And if you go to JPL today, on the wall you can actually see one of these images that was colored in by the engineers and the scientists as they got back the data, one by one.  And it was kind of like the first image from Mars that we got hand-drawn in, colored in,, and very similar to how Alma Thomas does her paintings. It's very reminiscent of that, that piece by piece. So I can absolutely see the connection there, how we're getting these images back. She's listening to how all of this is done and she's able to recreate that feeling in her own way. I mean, even looking at the Starry Night photo..

It's like… This is amazing because you can kind of see she's capturing the night and she's capturing something that's lighting up the night, right? Maybe that's some reminiscence of the sun going down, the sunset in the corner. The yellow and orange and red strips, and the sea of blue. Or perhaps right there, that's supposed to look like…what other light source we have: the Moon. But of course those colors are warm, so it makes me think it's the sun. I'm not sure. [laughs]

But you can see where she's going here. You can very much tell these images are of looking up into the sky. The Martian one is quite interesting too, because she's using a lot of pink. With the pink and that red, and everyone thinks of Mars and they think of that like copperish color of the regolith or the soil there. And she's reflecting that as well as some of the blue, which I love because I don't know. Was… I'm not sure back then… Now we know that Mars absolutely certainly has traces of water from the past, but also water like today. Like there could be water right there – now, on the surface of Mars! And ice! So I'm not sure these blue strips are her referring  to this or if we had gotten that far back then. But maybe she knew something that the rest of us didn’t at the time. It's really nice.

[laughter]

Alexa

That's a really good point. Yeah, I didn’t even realize that. 

Emily

Yeah. Speaking of color of Mars, that's a really excellent point because there's another painting of hers. I'm sorry, I'm just going to keep dropping them in the chat. 

[laughter]

There's a painting called “Mars Dust” at the Whitney Museum here in New York, and it's red on blue. It's kind of almost like a checkerboard of red on blue. And I think about this painting a lot because in my free time, I am a NASA Solar System Ambassador…

Janelle

Oh yeah!

Emily

And in one of my first talks, I was talking to some school children about the Perseverance Rover on Mars, and I was asking these kids why they thought Mars was red. And this little kid, just full confidence, just goes “BLOOD!”

[Alexa and Janelle laugh]

Emily

And it was just like “Ohh no, that's not…”

[laughter]

Emily

And every time I look at this painting…

Janelle 

“blood?!”

Emily

…I just have that play in my head.

[laughter]

Emily

“Why do you think Mars is red?” And the answer, of course, is oxidization. Which we did explain.

Not in so many words, but.

[laughter]

Janelle

Wow. 

Alexa

“Blood” with such confidence. 

[laughter]


Janelle

I wonder what that kid thought is going on over on Mars.

Alexa

I want to know, yeah, I want that kid to become an engineer so we can get into that.. like that kid’s mind, and find out what their perspective of Mars is.

Janelle

Yeah. I just want to know if you were to ask that kid, you know, “Would you ever go to Mars one day?” I want to know what his answer is, because if it was “yes,” and he thought it was blood…

[laughter]

Alexa

That it's a brave soul.

Janelle

Very brave soul, braver than me.

[laughter]

Alexa

I think it's interesting to… Actually, now that you… So for the listeners’, I guess, context, I am also new to a lot of Alma Thomas work. A lot of it I have learned through diffusion through Emily's passion for Alma Thomas. And so like, I'm also looking at some of these paintings for the first time and, for example, the “Mars Dust” one is really interesting because it is kind of reminiscent of some of those microscopic images of different types of samples that we've gotten from, like, our journeys through space. And, also, “A Glimpse of Mars” kind of looks like… a little bit like cells under a microscope, too, so I just love like…

Janelle

Ooh Yes, you're so right.

Alexa

….Yeah. I just…I love how Alma Thomas is like able to capture all these different connections through something as simple, but also as complex as the way her art style is. I don't know if any of that is like technically accurate in art terminology, but those are like the feelings that she evokes with these, and it's amazing, like how much it can make you feel.

Emily

Yeah!

Alexa

…with her paintings.

Janelle

I love that comparison to the cells. It's so... It's so accurate. She's able to capture like the zoomed in and also the far zoomed out. Like these are very macro bodies. Mars is huge. It's a planetary body. The Moon, the sky…these things are vast, unending. 

But everything can actually look small the further you zoom out, too, because when, you know… those like videos of the universe, and ‘how small are we really?’ Earth turns into a dot to the point where you don't even see it anymore once you're zoomed out and are looking at the Milky Way.

And then, if you zoom in super close to things, it kind of can seem like planets, like cells and plants. It's just so strange how they're very small and the very big can start to look very similar. [laughs]

Alexa

For sure, like the microcosm and the macrocosm, yeah.

Janelle

Yeah! Yeah.

Emily

Yeah, I think it's partially so dramatic in being able to represent both the close up and the far away because of how she's applied the paint in these mosaic-like styles. There are different types of art like this, such as pointillism, which… the 1886 painting “Sunday at La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat is a pretty popular example of pointillism.

A lot of people may have seen it in the film, ‘Ferris Bueller's Day Off.’ It's also at the Art Institute in Chicago, so it's in the same museum collection as “Starry Night And the Astronauts” that we referenced earlier. With these mosaic compositions, it's encouraging us to look closely, but also to examine from a distance what's going on.These stripes look random at the outset, but then they fit together into a different type of whole.

These stripes of broken color that she's famous for, she invented those in the mid 60s and they become her signature style, to the point they're known as “Alma’s Stripes.” So they lead to this mosaic effect. But while they look random, they can't be necessarily, especially because she was so carefully plotting out the composition of each painting. There is some really cool talks also with the Smithsonian, but I think Crystal Bridges has one too, where they can look back and see like the underpainting, and see her pencil sketches, and her notes. And she was plotting out what colors to paint where. So she was so cognizant and so careful about this process. But I think to both of your points, it's like the versatility of these images where you can both look very closely and very far away and you get completely different reads, but they could still be related.

Which I think is similar (at least in my understanding) of how we look at scientific imagery in a way.

Janelle

Yeah, that's right. Ohh man, and you know when you were saying that I was looking back again at the “Mars Dust” mosaic and I realized that this pattern, I guess the tiles or her stripes. Did you say it was called her stripes? 

Emily

Alma’s stripes, yep!

Janelle

Yeah, it reminds me... Yeah, the cracked surface of Mars kind of looks super similar to this, right? It's like things like that. And for the viewers, I guess, think of like a desert. And you've got these cracked areas. Or actually, you don't have to imagine it! Look up some pictures of the Martian surface taken by Curiosity Rover or Perseverance Rover even more recently. And you can see what I'm talking about. That's so cool. Ohh my gosh.

And just… the more we talk about it, the more you see, just like you're saying. And you're right. She's being intentional here. This is not. This is not random for sure.

Alexa

Mhm. Yeah, absolutely. And another thing too, that's interesting about…like the fact that you just said that it's intentional, and Janelle, you were talking about, it's like it's intentional and talking about the comparison with the actual images we have from Mars which –also, a wild thing that I can't believe we live in a lifetime where we're able to see pictures of Mars. I'm still not over that fact. It also reminds me of spectroscopy in a sense, and how scientists and the instruments that we put on these spacecraft are pretty much like reading things out, you know, line by line and trying to understand… make inferences about our galaxy, about our solar system through these like colors and shapes. For example, the barcode of the sun, which we’ll drop in show notes. I'll  find it somewhere, but it's like a really cool like spectrum.

And it feels very reminiscent of like what Alma Thomas is doing, too. That intentional categorization, I guess. From like from your perspective, Janelle, does that... does that analogy also seem true? Based on like your work with like imagery and operations?

Janelle

Yes! Oh man, as you were saying that I was like, “I've gotta look this picture up. I've gotta look it up.” I think I found it. My computer's just being slow. I'm gonna send you guys a link in a second.

[laughter]

Ohh man, here we go. As you were talking about the spectroscopy, it reminded me of one of the first scientific instruments I've ever operated. It was on the Cassini spacecraft, and it was called the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, or VIMS for short. And I loved operating this instrument because, like you said, it's looking at this object with a different set of eyes, if you will. 

So we had our visible camera, our visible light camera that would show us Saturn and its rings and its moons as they were. Then you have VIMS that shows you the unseen, that shows you the hidden, that tells you more about the makeup of this planet that we're out here orbiting and observing.

I've always thought of this as super iconic. The… how the blue and the indigo, red, and greens really contrast in the pictures and is… is so different than what you would get out of the Imaging Science Subsystem or the ISS– another instrument that was on the Cassini spacecraft. Where…when you look at Saturn, it looks super smooth like a…[laughs] I was gonna say like a baby's head. Why would I make that comparison?

[laughter]

Alexa

The all famous analogy of Saturn.

Janelle

[laughs] I don't know. I don't know how to describe it.

But those images are very much like, I don't know. They… they feel very put together, very not-patchwork, whatever the opposite of patchwork is, whereas the VIMS instrument produces these images that kind of remind me of what Alma Thomas does.

And oh man, now it's like OK, now you look back at her paintings and you can say, “OK now was she going even deeper here?” Because she had introduced these colors of blue in the Martian-like images? Maybe she was trying to say this is the difference of materials? Or was she talking about –yeah, like we talked about…Maybe she's thinking of ice on Mars. Who knows?

I mean, you could have so many angles here. Because when we're in space, oftentimes the most interesting images that we produce are not in the wavelengths that we see in the visible spectrum of light. They are in the wavelengths that we cannot see. And she could do that too... I I don't put anything past her. [laughs] That's for sure.

[laughter]

Emily

Well, that's other thing, too, is that I think that she was encouraging... Well, first of all, this VIMS image is so cool.

Alexa

Right?

Emily

I love the color and especially like the green at the bottom there and just how dramatic these shifts are. 

Janelle

Yeah. 

Emily

But she was… Alma Thomas was a teacher for middle school students in DC for 35 years before she retired, and became… dedicated her life to art full time. So I think just kind of part and parcel of her artistic practice is prompting all of these questions. 

Janelle

Yeah

Emily

But also she had said that her space paintings are just imagining life in space, as if she was an astronaut. And so I do think she could be thinking of all of these questions, especially not only as an artist, but as an educator, and imagining a future not only for herself, but for humanity, and especially for her students. Actually, in the first Smithsonian program about Alma Thomas, titled “Teacher, Artist, Trailblazer Part 1,” the presenter Cynthia Hodge-Thorne talks a bit about this, and I'll definitely include the link in the show notes.

Janelle

Wow. It's incredible to think that she was living during this period, especially at such an exciting time for space, right? But also such a turbulent time for the country. I think it's.. it's amazing that at the same time we were going to the Moon, we were also fighting for civil rights in our own country for all people. And Alma Thomas was alive for this. And during this era, – I… I learned a little bit about this just in my time being in the world of space and going to various talks– that there were a lot of Black people, African Americans, who were very against the space race. They're like, “Why in the world are you guys trying to get to the Moon when we can't even treat people right here?” And something I didn't realize is that as part of the space race, we talk about Sputnik, we talk about how Russia sent in the first satellite, sent the first person to space as well. And as America was struggling like, “We need to do this now! We need to… we need to get in the race. We need to win this,” Russia also sent the first Black person to space, too. Kind of as a “AHA!” to America, to say “You guys can't even get your own stuff together.” [laughs] 

But yeah, despite all of this, Alma Thomas must have found space so fascinating, so worth it to even think that she was thinking of herself, like “What would it be like for me to go to space?” Having those dreams that so many people in America were having, watching those astronauts in the Apollo missions finally get out there, step foot on the moon. 

She was able to still feel that magic despite what was going on around her which I find really, really inspired. It must mean that she really cared about this, is what I'm saying. Because for your average Black person in the era, there was so much else going on that this must have been something… she saw something truly special in the space travel, and I think she would be proud to see how far we've come. For sure, she would be proud to see how far we've come. It is certainly possible for an Alma Thomas to go to space in today's… in today's age, which is lovely.

Alexa

Mhm

Janelle

Yeah, I… I love to always just bring up the atmosphere of the time, especially for an artist as herself with her background. What else may have been going into her art and in her mind, too?

Emily

Yes, not to continue my “There’s an Alma Thomas painting for everything,” but…

Janelle

[laughs]

Emily

 ….she was living in DC! She participated in –

[laughter]

 She participated in the…that's such an excellent point because you had flagged earlier that she's mainly painting in these abstract forms. But after a certain point, she gets rid of figuration entirely, and figuration is obviously when… it's when you're painting like representatives of the object, and it still kind of looks like that object.

She had painted only one more figurative painting in her life, and it was a scene from the March on Washington from when she was there. She participated in it, and if you're ever in DC at the MLK Library downtown, they actually have an Alma Thomas Reading room. I haven't been in it because it’s for children, but they also have an exhibition about protest, and she's included in the exhibition, and her painting about the March on Washington was later made into a commemorative postage stamp. And so at this exhibition they've got, if I recall correctly, I think they’ve got a preparatory sketch from that painting and a photo of her with it, or a photo of her in her studio as well as one of the commemorative stamps, so that's cool.

Alexa

You also… you bring up a great point as well, Janelle, like talking about the context and like the history of the artist at the time and....

Janelle

Mhmm

Alexa

…I'm trying to remember which mission it was specifically, but I think maybe it was like a year or two ago. I feel like there was a similar sentiment of like, “why are we going to space? Why are we spending all this effort doing all this stuff when we're still having a hard time treating each other with respect here on Earth?”

And I think it feels like Alma Thomas's passion for her work, that really shines through, shows you that there are two, like, real benefits to space travel. There are so many. But when it comes to like the human factor on Earth or like the social factor, it's like 1. Spaceflight and like space in general is a really great medium for, you know, if it can inspire an artist like Alma Thomas to create work that evokes so many amazing feelings in people and, like, inspires them not just to like, go to space, but also just in their everyday life. And also– in addition to that–and also collaboration, cause I feel like over the years we fortunately gotten to a point where we've had like much more international collaboration and collaboration with people with so many different backgrounds. There's still so much more that we can… that we can improve, you know, and pursue but…

Janelle

Mhm

Alexa

…I feel like maybe, to that point, that is one of the benefits of space travel is it does bring people together in a sense, and I think it's a nice like a common goal for people to have when we have so many problems that are dividing us, there's this one thing that can really unify us, you know, and move forward.

Janelle

Absolutely. Space is unifying in so many ways, in so many important ways. They…Look at the International Space Station, it is about to be decommissioned. It's towards the end of its life. But that is an effort that took more than one country, and to know that even today we have astronauts from around the world unified as they circle the Earth at terrifyingly fast speeds.

It's… it's certainly one of these, like last rays of hope that we can do anything when we do it together. And you're absolutely right in that being such an important effect of space. And one of the huge benefits of space I think people underestimate. Because space can also be seen as a  competition field, too. Where we had the space race, we had the arms to get there. I mean the reason why there was such a rush to get to space and to prove that you could go is because, well, if you can get to space, you have the ability to then do a lot of things from space.

That means defense. When you think defense, it means that you could do espionage from space. It means that you can take high resolution images of different areas. You can do mapping, you can. You can do a lot of things.

But also, you can do these things that bring people together, which I think is important too, and I'm glad that we went in that direction and still have a way to hold on to that togetherness versus focusing on needing to protect because of fear of what other people, other countries’ capabilities are from space.

Alexa

Yeah, absolutely. Those are great points.

Emily

And it's especially relevant, too, I think a couple months ago there was all of that news about like Russia's space capabilities and what that might mean for security.  But also going back historically, I mean we touched on the civil rights movement, but in your Smithsonian talk, you had talked about meeting..You got to meet Edward Dwight. 

And we were just talking about him prior to this podcast, ‘cause it's so cool to see that he finally got the opportunity to go to space with Blue Origin and Space for Humanity! And would you talk about your opportunity to meet him and that event that you mentioned in your Smithsonian talk?

Janelle

Yeah! That… Man, that was such a… it took me so off guard to just be on Instagram one day, scrolling through, coming across Space for Humanity’s page and seeing that Edward Dwight was going to be going up next. Ohh man, my heart – just what I felt for him in that moment. And this is a man who was promised a dream and didn't get to live it. And it felt, man, it just felt like we owe it to him. We owe it to him the chance to be able to experience what he didn't get to experience all those years ago. 

And for anyone who doesn't know his story, this event that I went to when I was at NASA, I believe it was... It was a screening of a film. And I believe the film was called Black in Space. Something… something along these lines.

And the focus was talking about some of these hidden figures we have been exposed to through the blockbuster hit film, you know Katherine Johnson, these hidden figures that worked in space and their stories. And while people may know about some of the black astronauts who have been to space, maybe they don't know about Edward Dwight, who was the first black astronaut candidate. So you can think of it as honestly…Yeah. America was kind of pressured, you know, “Russia sent a black person to space, why can't you?” [laughs]

So they did choose a candidate and it happened to be Ed and, you know, he trained. He did all these things. And in the end, they said, “Sorry, but you're not gonna fly.” It's really devastating to hear, you know? And he had so much that he was working against. There were prejudices that he had to endure, and in the end it wasn't his call to make whether he could finally really be that.. that astronaut, he got to experience going to space.

And so to see that he was able to finally go? Oh, I'm just really, really happy that Space for Humanity made that happen, that someone remembered him and was able to fulfill what I'm sure has been like the dream that felt impossible for him during his lifetime. 

So yeah, at that event I was talking about, at that film screening and the story talked a lot about his experiences. And then it was just like, “OK, everyone, time for Q&A! And he's like… he's here! Like what?! 

[laughter]

Janelle

He's like sitting like a row or two in front of me. Like, you're kidding! You're kidding. He's in the audience?! 

Alexa

Oh my gosh

Janelle

I could not believe it! I mean, you feel like you hear these stories, and then it's like you learn about these people. But maybe they’ve passed by this point, or they're not around anymore. 

But we told his story while he's still here and, you know, I'm trying to keep in all the excitement cause I'm not trying to freak him out or anything, but I was beaming. 

[laughter]

I wanted so badly to just shake his hand, to be able to give him a hug and say, you know, “Wow. Once again, I am learning about history that directly impacts why I'm here today.” Like I had no idea about the… the hidden figures in the… the huge movie hit before I saw the movie, and I didn't know about Edward Dwight either. And in that moment, just everything changed for me because here I am now with… with a hero, with someone who paved the way for someone like me to now exist in this space. So it was super special. I still have all the pictures I took with him that day. I will cherish them forever. In fact, I should probably post them and be like, [laughter]

 “Shout out! Shout out to Edward Dwight who finally got his chance. [punctuated with enthusiastic desk noises] He finally went to space. It was– It happened! 

So yeah. Really, really special moment. And man, I… I was surprised in the best way to hear he finally got his chance to go.

Emily

I'm so happy, yeah. And for… for our listeners who may not be familiar, like this mission literally just happened. Like May 2024. Yeah.

Janelle

Yeah! Yeah! Very recent

Emily

Yes, they're just democratizing access to space. They're… they're a nonprofit. And they partnered with Blue Origin. I think previously they've also partnered with other space companies, but it was just… it was just such good, such cool news to see.

Janelle

Yeah, they're changing people’s lives.

Alexa

For real, yeah. I sneaked over to the Museum of Flight here in Seattle. They're having a “Home Beyond Earth” exhibit, so I went yesterday and there was somebody from Blue Origin, actually, who was talking about Space for Humanity and some of the things, like she was talking about her interaction with Ed Dwight after he came back, after he landed. She was saying that he had said, “I didn't think I needed this anymore in my life. I had lied to myself.”

And like the fact that he was able to fulfill that.. it's just like…I started crying in the auditorium.

Janelle

Ohh man, I can't think about it because y'all are gonna make me cry. 

[laughter]

Janelle

Oh wow. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't get better than that, right? It really doesn't.

Alexa

I feel like we could talk to you about, like, go back and forth about intersections between like, art and space for so much longer. But where can our listeners find out more about you and your work? And like other things that you've done online?

Janelle

Ohh good question. You can find me online on Instagram at @itsjanellie - ITSJANELLIE.  I got it right first time. And also if you just search my full name “Janelle Wellons,” you can find my website and all sorts of fun videos of me talking about space, my journey, and everything in between.

I did want to have one last kind of message, maybe, for people about why art is so important to space. When you think about the entry point, when you ask people, “why did you decide to become a (blank) engineer, someone who works in space – a scientist, an astrophysicist, a rocket scientist? Why did you choose?” I feel like many people’s journeys really do start with the art.

You see the images. You see the videos, the rockets launching. You see the Martian surface, you see the astronauts, and this elicits inspiration. You feel this feeling of wow, just like when looking at Alma Thomas's mosaics, the art. It just elicits this really unique response that space truly is the final frontier. That's how it was for me, and that's what inspired me to get into this field when I thought of the word “space,” I just thought of the endless possibilities, and it's due to these things. And so it absolutely applies. It's so important and I'm really glad to see that you guys have this podcast that's really bringing home the fact that art and space are like cousins! [Laughter]  So thank you so much for having me on your show!

Alexa

Thank you so much.

Emily

Yes, thank you so much for speaking with us, this has been truly so special and we're very cognizant of all of the different time zones and the time differences. And we just really, really appreciate your time. And also just your insight and your energy. This has been absolutely delightful.

Janelle

Thank you both!

[Interlude music: Space by Music_Unlimited]

Alexa

Thank you so much for listening, we hope you enjoyed our conversation about Alma Thomas with Janelle Wellons. This was such a blast to record and we hope you had fun listening!

Emily

 As we noted at the start of the episode, we're taking a brief break over the next few weeks, but we look forward to resuming next month. In the interim, feel free to follow us on socials @artastrapodcast on Instagram, Twitter/X, Bluesky, and Facebook. If you haven't already, it would mean the world to us if you leave a review or rating on your podcast platform of choice, or just share the show with your friends. 

Alexa

As always, show notes for this episode and all others are available on our website, artastra.space, as well as transcripts for each episode as they launch. For this episode, there are links to each of the programs we mentioned, as well as the paintings, and Janelle's website and social links. 

Emily

Thank you so much! Until next time!

Alexa

‘Til next time!

[Outro music - “Space” by Music Unlimited]

Emily Olsen
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Episode 06: Space Archaeology with Dr. Justin Walsh
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Episode 04: The Space Paintings of Alma Thomas (Part 1)