— Move over Snoopy... NASA has a new character helping to promote its deep space exploration plans. His name is... Uncle Traveling Matt.

No really, move over.

"Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure" has taken over the same theater the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida previously used for "All Systems Are Go," featuring the comic strip beagle. The new stage show stars the Jim Henson Company's subterranean Muppets as they discover outer (outer) space for the first time.

"I went back through the canon of the original [1983 HBO] series and then our reboot ['Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock" for Apple TV] and I was like, 'Wait, Uncle Matt never really questioned what's beyond, because he thinks he's done it all.' He's like, 'Oh, I've explored outer space' — that's what the Fraggles call our world, right? So he's like, 'I've done it,'" said John Tartaglia, the show's director, writer and choreographer, as well as creative supervisor for Fraggle Rock at the Henson Company, in an interview with collectSPACE.

"So for him to have his mind blown that there's something even beyond that, I thought that was such a fun way to push that character's journey forward," said Tartaglia.

To differentiate between the Fraggles' use of "outer space" — the land where the "silly creatures," aka us humans live — and our "outer space," the show refers to the latter as "outer outer space." (It is not yet clear if that concept will live on beyond the NASA show. "I think it could be," Tartaglia said. "We haven't explored that yet." No pun intended.)

A funny thing happened...

As "Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure" opens, Gobo, Red and their friends are still at home and us "silly creatures" are at Kennedy Space Center. The trick, said Tartaglia, was finding ways to bridge that gap while staying true to both realities.

"We always want to stay true to the world," said Tartaglia. "You have to justify why the Fraggles are there."

The Doozers offered one way. The show's small, green, industrious creatures are, in their more modern incarnations, technologically adept and have developed DoozerCam, a FaceTime-like video call system that is able of connecting Fraggle Rock with outer space.

As the show opens, the DoozerCam shows the Fraggles in the midst of a familiar scene — the title sequence from the show, complete with their theme song — until they notice the audience of humans watching them.

"NASA, wisely, really wanted people to immediately get into that vibe of Fraggle Rock," Tartaglia told collectSPACE. "We could have just written a show where it all takes place at Kennedy Space Center, but I think people really want to peek in and see Fraggle Rock, so it just felt like the appropriate, rule-based way to do it that felt right to the world, but also kept Fraggle Rock a cool, distant mystery place that you want to go visit."

But to really bring the Fraggles to Kennedy required a postcard ... and a change of scale.

...on the way to the moon

In the series, Traveling Matt wrote about what he had encountered in outer space through on postcards that he sent to his nephew, Gobo, back at Fraggle Rock. Gobo would then share his uncle's adventures with his friends, including Red, who particularly loathed them.

In "Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure," it is a postcard with a photo of a "cookie" on it that leads Traveling Matt, Gobo and Red through a "Fraggle hole" to Kennedy Space Center. It it there that they meet a representative of NASA's Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) division and learn of outer outer space and that the cookie is really the moon.

(Asked why Traveling Matt would not have recognized the moon from his time in outer space, Tartaglia said that perhaps he did see it, but only as a thin crescent and did not equate the two. Or maybe it was that he was "so forward-driven" that he never bothered to look up.)

As Gobo, Red and Traveling Matt step through the Fraggle hole onto the stage at Kennedy, they are no longer hand-operated puppets but full-body "walk-around" characters. And to remain to scale, that meant up-scaling another character, too.

"When we scaled up the Fraggles to be costume-size, so they could dance and move without being encumbered by being just puppets, we realized that one of the Doozers would have to become puppet size. That was really fun to do because the real Doozers are six inches tall and they are animatronic. They're teeny, and now they get to have their glory as hand puppets," said Tartaglia, who also voices Gobo for the show and performs as him when in puppet size.

Down at 'Fraggle Rock'

When NASA first got in contact with the Jim Henson Company about bringing the Fraggles to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Tartaglia and his team knew it would be cool. And once they decided to have Uncle Traveling Matt be the show's central character, the plot came together fairly quickly.

"He's a great character to learn from because he is so oblivious and he thinks he knows everything, and he really doesn't. So he's a great character to use as a bridge for the audience to be able to learn all these awesome facts and figures about NASA," said Tartaglia.

He and his team also came to appreciate how much "Fraggle Rock" shares with the space agency, its activities and goals.

"We all started talking and realized really quickly that Fraggles and Doozers and the whole message of 'Fraggle Rock' — especially about Uncle Matt — is about exploring new worlds, making discoveries and the whole fragile ecosystem. All of these different worlds need each other and want to work to learn more about each other. It sounded all very aligned with what NASA does and the whole purpose of space exploration," said Tartaglia.

"So our two worlds that on paper wouldn't seem connected, made a lot of sense to connect," he said.

"Fraggle Rock: A Space-y Adventure" is included with Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex admission. Check the daily schedule upon arrival for showtimes.