'Earth to Space' art festival set to launch at Kennedy Center this week

A nearly month-long space mission is ready to lift off, with final preparations being made at the Kennedy Center.

To be clear, not NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but rather the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

"Earth to Space: Arts Breaking the Sky" is set to transform the United States' national cultural hub into a launch pad for three weeks of live performances, films, art, interactive exhibits and discussions, all inspired by spaceflight and the wonders of the universe. The festival will see artists paired with astronauts, poets perform with physicists and dancers take the stage with spacecraft designers.

EARTH to SPACE Festival @ The Kennedy Center | March 28 - April 20, 2025 - YouTube

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"How do we use space? What are the issues with space? And how does space help us understand more about Earth? Those are the themes we explored as we talked to artists and scientists and traveled about to meet with people to understand as much as we could about this topic," said Alicia Adams, vice president for international programming at the Kennedy Center, in an interview with collectSPACE.com.

Related: Photos: President John F. Kennedy's spaceflight legacy

"Earth to Space" is the center's third festival as part of a decade-long initiative themed to the arts and nature. After focusing on rivers in 2023 and the forest in 2024, Adams and her co-curator, Gilda Almeida, were motivated by NASA's current focus on returning to the moon and the center's namesake to look beyond the planet for this year's event.

"[President John F.] Kennedy was an inspiration to us because he was the person who initiated the moonshot," said Adams. "There are lots of quotes about what Kennedy thought about space. We do these things 'not because they are easy, but because they are hard,' as he said, and 'it's in our nature to explore,' so we started there."

The festival, which runs from Friday (March 28) through April 20, blasts off, quite literally, with a one-night-only event. On Saturday (March 29), the sky over the Potomac River will become a giant canvas for large-scale projections and custom fireworks to tell a truly cosmic story.

"Visible from the riverside of the Kennedy Center will be our big, splashy opening," Adams said. "What you will experience will be narrated by artist Cai Guo-Qiang's custom AI model cAI, and it's a love story. That's why it's called 'Interspecies Love Letter.'"

The "sky painting" will follow the relationship between Stella, a satellite, and her engineer Ethan on the ground. In the fleeting moments of her "life" searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, Stella reaches out from her graveyard orbit to both her love and a new friend with a message connecting them both.

"It is interactive as well. People will be able to use their phones to access a QR code and, at the right time, they will be given a signal to do a certain thing, which will launch fireworks into the sky," said Adams.

The "Earth to Space" sessions then get underway Tuesday (April 1) with a two-day special version of Starmus, the global celebration that unites science, music and art. For its U.S. debut, the conference will feature talks by Apollo 16 moonwalker Charlie Duke, astronaut-turned-artist Nicole Stott, National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt, SETI pioneer Jill Tarter, astrophysicist Garik Israelian and the Kennedy Center's own Youth Ambassador for the Arts and Environment, Aneeshwar Kunchala, among others.

There will also be a special dance performance by the Debbie Allen Dance Academy based on a poem written by Allen's mother Vivian Ayers, who was a "hidden figure" at NASA.

"In terms of diversity and inclusiveness, what we say to audiences is that it's of real importance to support the artists, to support the art, to support the work that we as curators and the staff of this center have been doing for the last 50 years," Adams told collectSPACE. Her reply was in reaction to the recent changes in the center's leadership and the White House's efforts to do away with federally run diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, like the type that Kennedy urged to hire women and minorities to work for the space program.

Related: NASA's real 'hidden figures'

Other highlights of the "Earth to Space" festival include:

• The U.S. premiere of the full 360-degree immersive experience, "The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks." The film earlier opened at Space Center Houston in Texas, but in a 270-degree giant-screen format. Visitors to the Kennedy Center will be able to see "Moonwalkers" as it was originally, and still is being shown in London.
• An opportunity to get an up-close look and a photo with Astrolab's FLEX, or Flexible Logistics and Exploration, lunar rover. FLEX is one of three lunar terrain vehicle designs that NASA has chosen for possible use by Artemis astronauts at the moon's south pole.
• The world premiere of "MOON," anoriginal performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group that is inspired by the Golden Record placed on the two 1977 Voyager interplanetary spacecraft as an introduction to humanity.
• The reveal of "The Next Giant Leap: Lunar Quilts," the resulting creation of a nationwide competition led by astronaut and textile artist Karen Nyberg, the first person to quilt while in space.
• "From Earth to Space and Back," an exhibition by Norman Foster and Foster + Partners, which features scale modules and 3D-printed structures examining how space exploration can help build a better future on Earth.
• And the "Moon Rock Club" that will offer a cabaret space for conversations over drinks and performances, including Vickie Kloeris, a food scientist who for 34 years worked in NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The full program of "Earth to Space: Arts Breaking the Sky" events, including more films, talks and performances, can be found on the Kennedy Center's website.

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