Art of NASA

The Illustrations That Sold the Missions

Piers Bizony

• Publisher: Motorbooks
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780760368077
• eBook ISBN: 9780760368084
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Formed in 1958, NASA has long maintained a department of visual artists to depict the concepts and technologies created in humankind’s quest to explore the final frontier. Culled from a carefully chosen reserve of approximately 3,000 files deep in the NASA archives, the 200 artworks presented in this large-format edition provide a glimpse of NASA history like no other.

*A 2021 Locus Award Winner*

From space suits to capsules, from landing modules to the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and more recent concepts for space planes, The Art of NASA presents 60 years of American space exploration in an unprecedented fashion. All the landmark early missions are represented in detail—Gemini, Mercury, Apollo—as are post-Space Race accomplishments, like the mission to Mars and other deep-space explorations.

The insightful text relates the wonderful stories associated with the art. For instance, the incredibly rare early Apollo illustrations show how Apollo might have looked if the landing module had never been developed. Black-and-white Gemini drawings illustrate how the massive NASA art department did its stuff with ink pen and rubdown Letraset textures. Cross-sections of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project docking adapter reveal Russian sensitivity about US “male” probes “penetrating” their spacecraft, thus the androgynous “adapter” now used universally in space. International Space Station cutaways show how huge the original plan was, but also what was retained.

Every picture in The Art of NASA tells a special story. This collection of the rarest of the rare is not only a unique view of NASA history—it’s a fascinating look at the art of illustration, the development of now-familiar technologies, and a glimpse of what the space program might have looked like.

1

THIS NEW OCEAN

The Dawn of the American Space Age

In 1954 many experts predicted that we would build orbital space stations and undertake lunar missions by the early 21st century. None of them imagined that the first humans would venture into space just seven years later.

The “Dan Dare” Dream

This promotional fantasy from the Boeing company was just one of many such visions presented throughout the 1950s by corporations keen to play a role in turning space fiction into scientific and technological fact.

1: This New Ocean

In 1954 the American public was informed that “scientists and engineers now know how to build a station in space that would circle the earth 1,075 miles up. The job would take 10 years and cost twice as much as the atom bomb. If we do it, we can preserve the peace and take a long step toward uniting mankind.” This vision was presented to a wide audience in a series of articles for Collier’s, a popular color illustrated magazine of the time. Between 1952 and 1954 seven major space articles were published, including descriptions of a lunar colony and a mission to Mars. Systems for potential future space missions, devised mainly by German-born rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, were brought to life by illustrators Chesley Bonestell, Rolf Klep, and Fred Freeman. There was a giant wheel-shaped space station gently turning on its axis, its crew enjoying artificial gravity generated by the rotation. A painting by Bonestell shows the station attended by winged rocket planes, while in the foreground huge landing ships are prepared for missions to the Moon “within the next 25 years.”

Willy Ley, a successful space popularizer in his own right, was von Braun’s major partner in creating the articles, along with many followup books. Most of these dreams had been familiar to rocket visionaries and science fiction enthusiasts since the 1930s, but the Collier’s articles represented perhaps the first time the public had been invited to think about rocket ships, space stations, and trips to the Moon as serious elements of national policy. The magazine sold three million copies a month. As a family title it would have been read by perhaps fifteen million people. Space was no longer just a vague dream. It was something for taxpayers to consider in earnest.

Aiming high

In the late 1950s, as America began to consider how to organize its space sector, major companies vied for the attention of Washington policymakers with enticing visions, such as this Boeing artwork of a rocket plane and a gigantic craft about to leave Earth on a great voyage of discovery.

A vision for life in orbit

Chesley Bonestell’s influential illustration for the Collier’s space-themed articles of 1954. A fleet of moon landers is built from components delivered into Earth orbit by winged space planes.

The literature of space

Hundreds of mid-20th century books, from cheap pulp editions to lavish art-quality volumes, helped sell the coming of the “Space Age.” The Conquest of Space, first published in 1949, was among the most significant.

Just four years after the last of the Collier’s space specials, the question of whether to turn any of those rocket visions into reality was becoming a matter of national importance. America had been planning low-key forays into space, but on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union got there first, launching a tiny satellite, Sputnik. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened for business ten months later as an emergency response to Sputnik and the likelihood that the Soviets were planning to launch people into space in the near future. The fledgling space agency inherited some ideas for human space flight from various smaller aerospace research organizations across the United States, most of which were swiftly absorbed into NASA. The most developed project was called Mercury. A tiny cone-shaped capsule would ride on the top of a small battlefield missile, the Redstone, based closely on Wernher von Braun’s notorious V2 rocket technology, which he had brought to fruition during World War II under the Nazi regime before escaping to America in the hope of pursuing his deepest ambition: the peaceful exploration of space.

Gaining control

Carl Zoschke’s illustration of a Mercury spacecraft’s reaction control system, manufactured by Bell Aerosystems. Color-coded arrows highlight pitch, roll, and yaw movements enabled by corresponding sets of thrusters.

Spam in a can

An accurate illustration by “A. Pierce” shows the equipment layout of the Mercury spacecraft manufactured by McDonnell Aircraft Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri, in conjunction with NASA’s Space Task Group at Langley, Virginia. This painting dates from 1961, the final months before the Task Group’s relocation to the much grander Manned Space Center in Houston.

Despite the Soviet threat, there were many doubts about the risks and vast expense of launching humans on temperame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• First Comes the Dream: How Art Showed the Way to Space
• 1 This New Ocean: The Dawn of the American Space Age
• 2 One Giant Leap: The Voyages of Project Apollo
• 3 Islands in the Sky: Inhabiting the Realm of Earth Orbit
• 4 Brave New Worlds: Back to the Moon & Toward The Red Planet
• 5 The Expanse: Exploring Depths of Space Beyond Mars
• Index
• Image Credits
• Copyright