In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the U.S. “space program” consisted of little more than a few captured German V-2s, and trips to the moon were still popularly regarded as the idle dream of adolescent boys. But a number of rocket engineers were already busy designing the spaceships of the near future. When their new ideas began to appear in general-interest magazines like Life and Collier’s, it was the illustrations of Chesley Bonestell that helped bring them to life.
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A former architect who’d worked on the Golden Gate Bridge and New York’s Chrysler Building and designed sets for Hollywood movie studios, Bonestell worked closely with rocket designers and astronomers who provided him with photographs, models, and other information. His audacious paintings of multistage rockets roaring into space, wheel-shaped space stations orbiting the earth, and fleets of spaceships arriving on the moon not only inspired an entire generation of aerospace engineers and influenced the direction of the space effort, but also helped convince many lay people that space flight was a practical possibility. “It was an inspiration for a lot of writers at the time,” says Mark Paternostro, an artist and designer at the Adler Planetarium. “It brought the whole idea of space travel to the general public.”
The imaginative power of his paintings is even more impressive. With a natural sense of pictorial drama that bordered on kitsch, Bonestell offered a subjective, even lyrical view of landscapes and panoramas that for all their strangeness might actually exist somewhere. For instance, in his 1972 painting of Saturn as seen from a mountain valley on its moon Titan, he invites us to imagine ourselves in space suits, tramping through a field of eerie haze as we look up to see the ringed planet looming hugely above us in the dark sky. Pictures like this not only tweak our sense of wonder but also vividly document the excited anticipation many felt in the giddy rush of the space age. “As more information becomes available, it still doesn’t take anything away from the painting as a work of art,” says Paternostro of Bonestell’s work. “The piece becomes a nice time marker: this is the way we thought things were at this point.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Saturn See From Titan, Its Largest Moon,” painting by Chesley Bonestell.
