Earthbound stars: How one man turned planetarium shows into art

You’d always wanted to go to a planetarium. Maybe you’d seen one in a movie or heard about it from a friend, or maybe you just absorbed the meaning of “planetarium” through cultural osmosis. When the show starts, you aren’t sure what you expect, but it certainly isn’t this.

You don’t expect to get blasted through asteroid belts, past stars and planets and all the way to the Andromeda galaxy. You don’t expect such a genuine sensation of movement that you have to close your eyes to remind yourself that you are still. And you certainly don’t expect the presentation to be pre-recorded by Tom Hanks, who tells fascinating tales about each celestial phenomenon, detailing how it was discovered or the ancient beliefs about it.

When it ends, you sit there in the dark — you expected to see some nerd give a lecture with a laser pointer. That’s just what Mark Littmann found when he became a planetarium director in 1965: some nerd with a laser pointer boring people to death and making them think that space was boring. Someone needed to change that.

Littmann never wanted to be a writer, much less a science writer. Sure, he wanted to do some writing, but the poems, plays and short stories he wrote in his spare time were pretty mediocre. However, he was smart, and he loved science — in a way.

“I realized that I wasn’t going to do aeronautical or aerospace engineering. ... I wasn’t terribly interested in engineering. Physics didn’t turn out to be very interesting or understandable either. I liked chemistry, I did that as an undergraduate major, but I couldn’t picture myself in a laboratory the rest of my life,” Littmann said.

When most people graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they shout it from the rooftops for the rest of their lives. Littmann, however, doesn’t even bring up the name of the school.

With a degree in chemistry from one of the best schools in the country, and no desire to be a chemist, Littmann’s mind turned back toward those mediocre plays and short stories, and he signed up for a master’s program in creative writing at Hollins College.

A year later, master’s degree in hand, Littmann realized he didn’t know what he was going to do with it. He still wasn’t happy with his ability to write fiction, and he wasn’t aware of any jobs that required a creative writer who was also a chemist.

Better at school than at planning ahead, Littmann decided to kick the can down the road even further, signing up for a Ph.D. program in English literature at Northwestern University, which was only about 300 miles from his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

“While I was working on my doctoral degree, St. Louis built a large planetarium, and I thought ‘gosh, that would be an interesting place to work for the summer,’” Littmann said.

When the McDonnell Planetarium director suggested that Littmann should apply as an astronomer, he was dumbfounded. He’d only had a single undergraduate course in astronomy, which was now several years ago. However, the director explained that the job was less about being a professional astronomer and more about being able to explain astronomy to patrons of the planetarium. Littmann thought he could do that — probably.

But, just to be sure he was ready for his part-time summer job, Littmann studied for weeks in the astronomical library at Northwestern University (complete with a fully functional observatory). He was determined to be ready to answer any question a sixth grader on a field trip could possibly ask.

Littmann liked the job at the McDonnell Planetarium enough to sign up for it again the next summer. And the staff must have thought Littmann was spectacular because, somehow, his fame as a part-time summer astronomer extended all the way to Utah.

“I got a letter from Salt Lake City asking if I’d be interested in directing the new planetarium that they were building,” Littmann said, laughing. “I thought that this was unbelievably wild, but I couldn’t resist at least trying.”

So, Littmann hit the books again, even harder this time. But he also did some introspection, some retrospection and some contemplation.

His entire life, Littmann’s family had taken him to museums, planetariums, aquariums and science centers. Thinking back to all the presentations he had seen in these places, Littmann had an epiphany. The planetarium was the perfect place for theater, and it was being horribly underutilized.

“It seemed to me that this was the most exciting dramatic atmosphere I’d ever seen,” Littmann said, the image glistening in his eyes. “I mean it gets dark. The stars come out as if by magic. The stars can move. You can do all kinds of visual effects on the screen, the big dome overhead. So, I began to foster some ideas.”

Littmann took these ideas to the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, which immediately snatched him up in 1965. Over the next 18 years, Littmann and his team revolutionized the art of the planetarium show by writing plays and musicals about Native American sky lore, the moon landing, the first female astronomer and all the wonders of space, along with the first-ever planetarium light show. Littmann even got the notion to write a science fiction play, which was met with resounding success.

So much success that Littmann was approached by someone from another planetarium who was looking to buy the show from him. Once again, this was completely unheard of. Even Littmann couldn’t believe it. But the event opened up the floodgates for grants and offers.

National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Rockwell International, The American Chemical Society: They all wanted a taste of Littmann’s work. Littmann and his team wrote, directed and recorded plays that were packaged and sent to these organizations to be performed in planetariums across the world.

“I could not contribute a thing to it, except that we were the test bed for trying it out,” Littmann said. “It’s gotten much better since then.”

Littmann left the planetarium in 1983 to pursue freelance science writing. During that time, he continued to write books about space and astronomy but found it difficult to get grants. In order to pay the bills, Littmann simultaneously began writing texts for exhibits at museums owned by NASA.

Despite the extra income, freelance writing wasn’t easy, especially when Littmann wasn’t writing best-selling mystery novels or those love stories you find in a bin at the grocery store. So, in 1991, Littmann began teaching journalism at the University of Tennessee. There, he wrote several books, continued to acquire grants for projects and was awarded the Hill Chair of Excellence in Science Writing.

“He’s one of those people that you could just see and feel the passion that he’s got,” said Thomas Cruise, one of Littmann’s former students. “With good science writing, you don’t need to take notes — you just remember it because it’s so compelling. And if you can instruct that same way like Dr. Littmann does, you don’t need to worry about just memorizing a multiple-choice test: You’re really learning. You’re really retaining it.”

Inspired by Littmann’s teaching, Cruise went on to work as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he wrote about the Nonreactor Nuclear Facilities Division. Fearful of potential budget cuts in 2016, Cruise did not pursue a permanent position at ORNL. Instead, he became the director of the Veterans Success Center at the University of Tennessee. However, Cruise’s office shelf is still filled with books from Littmann’s class.

“He would assign all these books, and it looks super daunting as a student, but I still have a lot of them,” Cruise said, gazing at his collection. “‘The Right Stuff,’ ‘Not Quite a Miracle,’ ‘Spillover’ . . . I have more at home.” Cruise especially loves “Not Quite a Miracle.” “I’ve read that one so many times. Dr. Littmann would get emotional talking about that one.”

In 2023, Cruise suggested that I take Littmann’s class, Science Writing as Literature. At 84 years old, Littmann scooted into the classroom, his walker piled high with loose papers. He passed out the syllabus and read part of it aloud.

“Works by authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, David Quammen and Richard Selzer are analyzed for literary qualities in a quest to understand why some science writing succeeds,” Littmann said. “And if you’ll notice, it also says that I would love it if everyone made an A in this class.”

A man who didn’t know how to sit still, Littmann finished his sixth book that semester, at the end of which he retired.

This article was produced in conjunction with Brian Canever’s JREM 414: Magazine and Feature Writing class.