In the 1950s and 1960s, many children carried lunches to school in decorated metal boxes. The American Thermos Products Co. released this lunch box the year after the launch of Sputnik. This side shows fictional spacecraft circling the earth. The thermos portrays an imaginary lunar launch.

 

Objects suggested that the lives of ordinary people might be transformed by the space age. This lunchbox shows characters from The Jetsons, a popular television cartoon about a family of the 2060s that lived in a house on stilts, above the earth's surface. Drawings for one end of the box show Judy Jetson in her flying saucer at the top, with her high school below. High schools— though not ones in space—would become the focus of much of the reform in science education.