Patrick Moore and illustrator David Hardy first collaborated in the early 1950s, and by 1954 had drawn up plans to produce a book filled with images of space stations, Mars missions and journeys to the outer Solar System. That book never came together, though the two produced others in the 1970s. Now Moore and Hardy have teamed up again with Futures: Fifty Years in Space, subtitled ‘The Challenge of the Stars.’ Its lovely images fall into the ‘don’t miss’ category, ranging from the exploration of nearby planets to strange worlds around stars thousands of light years from Earth.
We need the imagining of these places — it’s a key part of the drive to explore — and astronomical artists have been delivering scenes no one alive may ever see for a long time now. Moore and Hardy’s book reminds me of the excellence of Wyn Wachhorst’s The Dream of Spaceflight, a non-illustrated meditation on growing up in the space age and the nature of our compulsion to move into new terrain. Wachhorst devotes part of his book to the great space artist Chesley Bonestell, capturing the romance of those old images that, for some of us, were our first look at distant worlds.
Many of these images appeared in Life Magazine and many in Hollywood (Bonestell’s paintings were the basis of the visual effects in Destination Moon, among other films). Remembering Bonestell’s view of Saturn from the surface of Titan in one issue of Life (used as the cover art for his book), Wachhorst comments:
His photographic realism gave the readers of Life a new perspective on the night sky. According to the best science of the time, this would have been their view had they actually stood on the moons of Saturn. Bonestell did for the heavens what the microscope did for our perception of life, opening worlds within worlds, inviting adventure, converting points of light into real places. “You may roam about here,” his paintings seem to say. “This mysterious island, fresh from creation, is made a place by your mere presence.” Bonestell put tiny space-suited figures in most of his scenes, for which one could search like a signature, a perspective reminiscent of the sublime landscapes of nineteenth-century romantics. In painting the planets of other suns, where the setting of a red giant might span the whole horizon with an ethereal arch of deep orange fire, Bonestell expressed his faith that light-years would not forever imprison us in the solar system; for in the late forties, even Mars seemed so remote that whoever could touch it would surely reach the stars. (p. 50)
And later:
In the hidden heart of science fiction had always been the hope that the moon and planets promised a personal adventure akin to my encounter with the Pacific — a transitory, enchanted moment when man…would hold his breath before the fresh green breast of some radiant new world. At that moment, the cosmos would become a place. This was the promise of Bonestell’s beaches — that those peaceful points of light in the night sky are places, that virgin rocks, asleep for a billion years, await my touch no less than the cup that sits here before me, that there is a ‘transcendent mundaneness’ abiding in parallel time and space, one that somehow merges the cosmic and the personal. A Bonestell moonscape is a sacred place at the edge of the known world — an altar set before the barrier, a piece of the mundane bathed in oceanic mystery. (pp. 56-57)
Bonestell’s Life Magazine paintings were collected in 1949’s The Conquest of Space, written with German rocket scientist Willy Ley, and still capable of seizing the imagination even in a day when images from JPL show us the staggering reality. The Art of Chesley Bonestell, collected by Ron Miller, Frederick Durant and Melvin Schuetz, is a wonderful place to start if you’re coming late to his work. For a wonderful study of how the Titan painting was created, see ‘The Genesis of a Masterpiece.’
