A comparison of displays of science and technology at the science museum and in television programmes in the 1950s and 1960s indicates that both media relied on categories related to everyday life to organise their displays and make science and technology part of their audiences’ daily existence. However, this community of outcome should not obscure the fact that each medium displayed science and technology according to specific conventions.

From this vantage point, the specific example of the display of space conquest in the sixties in both media opens up interesting perspectives. The topic of space conquest was a new one in the sixties, insofar as space conquest started in earnest at that very moment, and it dominated science communication for the period. Further, when it comes to television and the museum, the sixties was a period of definition or re-definition, respectively, for both media in terms of conventions of display.

This paper considers the evolution of displays of space conquest both at the Science Museum in London and in BBC television science programmes during the sixties. Examining how the two media appropriated the topic, and in doing so fashioned their language of visual display in distinctive ways, it argues that each medium can be said to have become more articulated about the topic as time went on.

Whilst the science museum shifted away from an aesthetic of accumulation towards one of sobriety and showmanship, television science distanced itself from the culture of radio broadcasting in favour of the conventions of film-making and increasingly forwarded the intimacy that the motion picture camera can procure as a way of knowing.