Vacuuming toward space exploration

The round, aerodynamic shape makes the sound of air blowing, almost resembling a small rocket about to take off.

Designers fueled cosmic exploration enthusiasm with specially designed everyday objects, such as unique globular shaped colorful vacuum cleaners. Being part of visual propaganda for space exploration in development, one vacuum cleaner - Raketa, the predecessor of Saturnas, predated even cosmic rocket launches exploring outer space.

The earthly Saturn planet representations were produced for the USSR market, but had a Lithuanian name - ‘Saturnas’. Thus, Soviet and Lithuanian identity-forming factors were combined. In several books and exhibitions, ‘Saturnas’ is presented as an example of Soviet design. Contrastingly, in other sources such as the exhibition Stories of Things: Lithuanian Design 1918–2018, the described object is framed as belonging to the Lithuanian design category. As exhibition memorabilia, ‘Saturnas’ was even commemorated in a pin form. It represents Soviet advancements in outer space travel, but the design and production of the vacuum cleaner were made in Lithuania, making a substantial case for ‘Saturnas’ being a product of Lithuanian creativity. The viewer has to choose whether to give more importance to the underlying ideology that provided the basis for the design or Lithuanian creativity that shaped the materiality of the intergalactic vacuum cleaner.