Now Frosty had an idea, a crazy idea. The kind of idea that could get some notice in this art world. And the kind of idea that would raise the eyes of the press in moonstruck America. If they could put a man on the moon, how hard could it be to get a museum up there. Frosty was going to put an art museum on the moon.

Frosty reached out to the organization E.A.T., which stands for Experiments in Arts and Technology. The group was founded by two engineers, Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, from Bell Telephone Labs, and two artists, the afformentioned Robert Rauschenberg, and the Robert Whitman, who was a good friend and often collaborator with the also afformentioned Claes Oldenberg. They had worked together previously in 1966 to put on a series of theater events that incorporated arts and emmerging technologies, and decided that they wanted to build a platform from which other artists could benefit from similar colaborations with engineers in the Bell Labs team. Thus in 1967, the E.A.T. was formed. And in 1969, Frosty reached out to them with his idea for a moon museum.

Frosty and Fred Waldhauer hatched an idea for how they were going to make their museum a reality: use the same tech that allowed the scientists at Bell to design the circuit boards in phones, and etch the sketches the artists had made into a tiny ceramic waifer, half an inch by three quarters of an inch wide. So Frosty collected up sketches from five other artists and himself, and about sixteen of these ceramic waifers were made, one to go to the moon, and the rest to go to the artists and engineers involved. (That’s how now adays you could go see a copy of the Moon Museum in the MoMA, but it’s not the real deal.) Making these was easy enough. Now.. now he just had to... ya know.. get this thing to the moon. And, as it turns out, there was one thing, or rather, one entity, that stood in between this museum and its final destination: N-A-S-A, or as you probably know it NASA.

Now NASA was not formed to provide collaboration between artists and engineers. In 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronatics and Space Act, which officially changed over the National Advisory Commity for Aeronautics, or NACA, to the National Aeronautics and Space Administartion. (Sound bite)