The oceans have been a setting for SF since Jules Verne, so perhaps it's not surprising that genre authors and artists have put one of the ocean's most fascinating inhabitants in space. (The author misses one of my favorite examples, David Brin's starship-piloting dolphins.)
For more images of Whales In Space, see whalesinspaceblog.blogspot.com
The Fantastical Allure of the Space Whale (Lapham's Quarterly)
The space whale was born at the tail end of two hundred of the worst years in the history of cetacean-human relationships. Like other charismatic megafauna, the whale went from threatened to idolized with dizzying speed. The early-nineteenth-century whaling vessels that were the setting for Melville’s Moby-Dick took whales for their oil, their baleen, and their bones....
In the 1960s and 1970s, the country’s ongoing fascination with space, which (arguably) began with the popularity of “rocketman” television shows in the 1950s, coincided with burgeoning environmentalism. (Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us was a bestseller in 1951.) Photographers and filmmakers like Jacques Cousteau and James Hudnall published new images of whales in their underwater habitats, and nature writer Victor B. Scheffer had a hit in the popular book The Year of the Whale.
Meanwhile, science fiction increasingly linked space exploration with psychedelic mind-expansion—a theme that fit with the implications of the new research on dolphin and whale communication.