Meanderings of a Fandom Magpie

On Monday, my husband and I took our daughter to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena for a tour. Which was a blast. They had scale models of the probes and satellites and robots they've made which--given JPL's history---is rather a lot of them. (My daughter wants to go to Mars. Hence the tour, because JPL made Pathfinder, Opportunity, Spirit and Curiosity. As well as one launching next year.)

My favorite there was a 1:1 scale model of Voyager 1, the deep space probe which launched in 1977 and which is still sending information back to JPL after all this time. Now, I don't remember Voyager 1 launching (I was...um, a little young to remember that, but not by much) but I am a second-generation Trekker, and in "Star Trek: the Motion Picture," Voyager 1 was V'ger, a probe which was taken over by an alien intelligence.

Voyager 1 launched with a disc containing music, sounds, pictures and so forth intended to be read by any alien intelligence. One of the pieces of music was by a blues composer, Blind Willie Johnson. Who I had not (at all) heard of before I read a throw-away line in spitandvinegar's "Ain't No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down)"




Funny, where fandom can lead us. I first learned of a deep space probe because of a movie, and I learned of a long-dead blues musician because of a fanfic. :-)