Florida Today reported Monday that writers from the hit TV series Mad Men are pitching a new show: a look at the early days of the U.S. space program through the eyes of the journalists who covered it. It’s a rich premise, especially in the Mad Men era: the 1960s were bookended by the first manned spaceflights in 1961 and the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969.

Wired spoke to Space Coast Film Commissioner Bonnie King, who emphasized that the show is far from a done deal, and is only one of several film projects currently in consideration for filming in the region. Among other factors, King is still searching for appropriate locations.

With luck, she’ll find one because this is a show I want to see. What better foil for the romance of the Space Race than the tried-and-true formula of Mad Men: professionals standing on the fringes of the zeitgeist, racing to keep up with a culture while doing their best to define its momentum? While previous movies and TV series about NASA have focused mostly on astronauts, the early pioneers of space travel owe much of their legend to the reporters who eagerly followed them, spinning an intricate fantasy of space exploration at the peak of the Cold War.

The members of the Cocoa Beach press corps were colorful figures in their own right as well. LIFE magazine initially maintained an exclusive deal for up-close-and-personal access to the astronauts and their families, while the rest of the press jockeyed jealously for access to the titans of the Space Race. Some of them are now household names: Walter Cronkite claimed in a 2002 interview to owe part of his career to his extensive coverage of John Glenn’s 1962 spaceflight.

Fifty years later, space exploration can still stir the public’s imagination. Last August, more than 3.2 million people live-streamed the Curiosity Rover’s descent to Mars (with another million tuning in on television).

According to King, the end of the Space Shuttle program has brought about renewed interest in NASA history from documentary filmmakers, although this is the first pitch for a related fiction project that she’s recently entertained.

“Space is hot right now,” NASA multimedia liaison Bert Ulrich told Wired. “We did over 100 documentaries in 2012” Ulrich credits much of the renewed interest in NASA to both the agency’s command of social media–the Curiosity Rover has over a million Twitter followers–as well as an explosion in educational programming, especially from cable channels .

NASA also consulted on–and appeared in–summer blockbusters like Avengers and the Transformers movies; on the small screen, The Big Bang Theory recently featured a NASA storyline.