Chesley Bonestell was born long before the flight of the first airplane, and yet he’s well-known as the most influential people in aerospace art. The painter, designer and illustrator died the year of the Challenger disaster—1986—but not before witnessing humankind embrace space in much the way he’d dreamed.
You see, Bonestell not only helped to popularize manned space travel and inspire sci-fi art and illustration, his ideas directly influenced the way US space scientists imagined the future of space exploration from Earth’s orbit to the Moon and other planets.
Wernher von Braun, the father of the US space program once wrote that “In my many years of association with Chesley I have learned to respect, nay fear, this wonderful artist’s obsession with perfection. My file cabinet is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had prepared to help him in his art work—only to have them returned to me with penetrating detailed questions or blistering criticism of some inconsistency or oversight.”
The following set of images shows a fraction of Bonestell’s very best works of art. They prove that he earned the title of “Father of Modern Space Art”.
Separation Over the Pacific
Source: Heritage Auctions
Saturn Viewed from Titan, c. 1952
Source: Heritage Auctions
Crashing the Unknown, AirResearch Mfg. ad, Aviation Week, August 21, 1950
Source: Heritage Auctions
Solar System
Source: Heritage Auctions
Rocket Ferry Leaving Mars, c. 1964
Source: Heritage Auctions
The Exploration of Mars, c. 1955
Source: Heritage Auctions
Orbital Rocket Airplane... Nova Zembla, c. 1976
Source: Forbes
Saturn-sized booster pushes interstellar expedition toward Earth orbit, c. 1964
Source: Forbes
Destination Moon (Pathé, 1950)
Source: Heritage Auctions
Chesley Bonestell designed the spaceship in the scifi movie When Worlds Collide (Paramount, 1951).
Source: Heritage Auctions
Source: Heritage Auctions
The Conquest of Space, book cover painting (New York, Viking, 1949)
Source: Heritage Auctions
Spaceships over Mars, Collier’s, April 30, 1954
Source: National Geographic
Collier’s March 22, 1952 “Man Will Conquer Space Soon”
Source: Horizons
Rocket to the Moon, Mechanix Illustrated, 1945
Source: Modern Mechanix
The Moon Lander, Collier’s, October 18, 1952
Source: Leo Boudreau
Orbital assembly, 1964
Source: X-Ray Delta One
Construction of a manned space station, 1949
Source: Leo Boudreau
Exploring Copernicus, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction illustration, October, 1969
Source: Tom Simpson
Rocket ship tow test, Collier’s, March 14, 1953
Source: Horizons
Preparing for launch, 1956
Source: X-Ray Delta One
Man on the Moon, Collier’s, October 18, 1952
Source: Horizons
Mars expedition prepares for return flight to Earth, Collier’s, April 30, 1954
Source: Horizons
Aerospace artists previously in this series:
- Attila Héjja – The Hungarian-Born Painter Who Immortalized America’s Space Program
- Paul Fjeld – 13 Amazing Paintings of Space Based On Actual Missions
- Robert T. McCall – 27 Paintings From the Most Famous Space Artist On Earth (And Off)
- Davis Paul Meltzer – The Forgotten Space Artist Who Envisioned the End of the Space Race
- John Conrad Berkey – The Space Artist Who Perfectly Painted All Our Cosmic Dreams
DISCUSSION
This beautiful art did point the way to how it might be done. And when we actually did it in 1957, 1961 and 1969, we were guided by these and earlier visions.
Many will argue over what slowed human space exploration in the 70s, 80s, 90s and now.
But I think the biggest factor is that we underestimated exactly hard it would be. Building a permanent colony on the Moon is orders of magnitude more difficult than just doing a brief camping trip to Tranquility Crater. I think this slowly sunk in over the decades that followed.
The other big mistake is that, at least in the US, we treated space exploration like it was some big spectacle of firsts and huge set pieces.
It’s not. Space exploration is not the photograph of the completion of the first transcontinental railway. Space exploration is the staggeringly dull, hugely expensive, backbreakingly arduous building of all the rail lines that followed that first one.
It’s all the boring infrastructure, the stuff the press doesn’t pay attention to, that will conquer space. Space isn’t Lewis and Clarke. Space is all the boring trucking that happens on the nation’s highways more than a century later.
But the public won’t pay for that until it’s an established fact of life. And it’s going to take a ton of money, trillions even, to really do it.