Behold, the planet Fredward, named for its most famous citizen. (Image courtesy Cory McAbee)

As we continue our voyage through space music, I thought it might be time to discuss space musicals. For my money, we just don’t have enough song and dance pictures set amid the stars — and there’s an even greater dearth of musicals concerning the exploits of cowboy/roughneck astronauts.

I speak of one Cory McAbee, the writer, director and star of the cult classic “The American Astronaut” and its 2009 successor “Stingray Sam.” Both films take place in a universe that channels old sci-fi and Wild West serials and meshes it all together with ponderings about science, gender relations, childhood and the irrefutable silliness of modern culture. And both films are certainly as silly as all get out, loaded with absurd situations and riveting dance numbers set to the music of McAbee’s band The Billy Nayer Show.

Needless to say, these two films are about the best thing ever — works of sheer creative genius– and I encourage anyone who hasn’t seen them to go check out the official Web page. You can even watch the first segment of “Stingray Sam.”

But seeing as this is a science blog, I suppose I should point out that even such fanciful works as these have more than a little science to them:

Space Punies: In “The American Astronaut,” the protagonist encounters a commune of space drifters suffering from what they call “space punies.” Real-life scientists just call this low-gravity muscle atrophy and bone loss. Naturally, we evolved our skeletal and muscular systems to support us against Earth’s gravity. Given a weightless environment, the body begins to adapt — even on relativity short orbital missions. It’s use it or lose it, which is why astronauts bother with all the exercise equipment (such as the C.O.L.B.E.R.T.). On longer missions the situation gets a lot more dire, making”space punies” a huge challenge to manned deep-space exploration — at least until a suitable means of simulating gravity comes along. Without this, the drifters in the musical have steadily turned into ghastly, frail puppet men who can never return to Earth.

Stingray Sam (Cory McAbee), right, squares off with the villain Fredward. (Image courtesy Cory McAbee)

Body Suits: The drifters in “The American Astronaut” really want one of their offspring to return to Earth, so they’ve encased one of the kids in a body suit. It’s main purpose is to make his bones and muscles strong via hydraulics. This is a lot like the premise behind the Russian penguin suit from the 1970s, which featured elastic bands and pulleys to create artificial force for muscles and bones to work against. The design eventually evolved into the Adeli Suit, intended for cerebral palsy rehabilitation. In McAbee’s musical, the suit also recycles body waste — something modern space suits aren’t geared to handle. Yet while the ISS currently recycles urine, NASA identifies in-suit body waste management as a key aspect of its man-system integration plans.

Gender-determinant pills: In “Stingray Sam,” much of the plot centers on how gender-determinant pills altered the scope of human reproduction — and human civilization. The narrator points out that female offspring are often a detriment to both poorer families (who may either need male labor or who can’t afford to pay a dowry) and rich families, who require a male heir. With the advent of gender-determinant pills, both the upper and lower classes nearly go extinct as everyone pops a pill to ensure male offspring. So far we don’t have gender-determinant drugs. We do, however, have sperm separation technology — and there are no shortage of concerns over where that could eventually lead us, as related here in the Oxford Journal of Reproduction.

Male pregnancy: In the universe of “Stingray Sam,” gender-determinant drugs have lead to the extinction of the working class and forced the all-male upper class to artificially impregnate each other. The two parents simply dub their offspring with a combination of their first names, thus “Fredrick and Edward had a baby named Fredward.” In the real world, only a few species (such as the sea horse) put males in charge of hosting the zygote, but some scientists really do foresee a future of child-bearing daddies. In 1999, Robert Winston insisted the technology was only 20 years off. According to Popular Science, he detailed a method by which the father undergoes a treatment of hormones and gets an in-vitro fertilized embryo implanted in the wall of his peritoneum, the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity. The delivery would take place via caesarian section.

As Tracy Wilson points out in “How Science Fiction Musicals Work,” there have been a number of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” inspired musical productions over the years — and if you really want to, you can argue that “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is a space musical as it centers on aliens. Otherwise, there seem precious few musicals about the cosmos.

Or am I overlooking something important? Also, which space musicals NEED to exist? Apollo 13 on Broadway? Flash Gordon, the Queen Musical? Hit me with it.

Need more space music? You’ll find it all right here.