Barbie Space Discovery Space Station Playset with Space Explorer Doll, Puppy, Workstation, Satellite Space Scenes & 20 Space Station Items:Chair, Test Tubes, Microscope, Puppy Bed, 3 - 7Years Old

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The two fashion figures spent several months on board the International Space Station (ISS) in 2022 as part of "Mission DreamStar," a joint outreach project by Mattel and the ISS U. Unlike Astronaut Barbie, who represents a far-off future goal that children must wait to achieve until they are older, Space Camp Barbie represents a real and immediately attainable way for children to engage with and study space. In an attempt to heal the nation, on February 14, 2021, podcast hosts Richard Martin and Alexander "AJ" Jones of the Cult Popture Podcast released an 18+ hour comprehensive podcast reviewing the 37 Barbie films.

But what sets these two very-well-traveled dolls apart may be less important than why they are just like all the other Barbies in children's hands, Weitekamp said. Over the past 57 years, Barbie's space wear has varied from fashion-forward to miniature replicas of the real thing. As such, she served the important purpose of showing young girls that they too could dream of spaceflight before there were women astronauts at NASA to be such role models. Subsequently, Denison and his fellow astronaut instructors got the idea to hide the Barbie as they set up the shuttle simulator ahead of each training run. Released 13 years before NASA accepted its first female astronauts and 18 years before the first American woman would go to space, the Miss Astronaut outfitted doll was ahead of her time.For its part, the Smithsonian is interested and plans to revise its current display, which labels the "Space Discovery" Barbie dolls as the "first two Barbie dolls to fly to space. As a classified flight, not much is officially known about what the astronauts did while in orbit, however one thing the STS-38 crew did do was photograph Barbie floating in front of a window with the Earth below as her backdrop. Barbie, a space Princess, sees her world rapidly change when the stars in the sky begin to fade away. Visit us in Washington, DC and Chantilly, VA to explore hundreds of the world’s most significant objects in aviation and space history.

Earth-bound throughout the 1970s, Barbie once again donned a spacesuit in 1985 — this time with flair. Astronaut Barbie comes complete with a costume change, and the doll in our collection is displayed wearing her second outfit — a shiny peplum miniskirt worn over silver leggings and knee-high pink boots. Barbie® astronaut doll is ready to launch a new story with the equipment needed to make her journey -- a shimmery spacesuit, helmet and gloves. And both Barbie dolls sport hair that has been styled, not just to prevent the flyaways of a bad hair day, but also to literally keep any hair from shedding into the spaceflight environment. However, unlike the other space-themed Barbie dolls in the collection, these two have actually been to space — aboard more than just a pink rocket in Barbieland.Denison was on assignment by Rockwell (today, part of the Boeing Company) as a space shuttle payload training engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston when in 1989 he received what would become the first Barbie doll to fly into space as part of a "white elephant" holiday gift exchange. A Barbie® flag and three packs of astronaut food (non-edible) set her mission on a course for success! The Space Discovery line, now for sale exclusively at Target, includes Barbie dolls identical dolls to those launched to the station, as well as dolls of Barbie's friends dressed in spacey outfits and related playsets.