Piers Bizony - The Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions

Chariot for Apollo

Davis Meltzer was an important illustrator of space themes during the Apollo era. This is his 1967 conception of a Saturn V ascending from NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

How Art Showed the Way to Space

In the early years of the American rocket program, explanatory graphics distributed by civilian space agency NASA were primitive by todays standards. The first press release depictions of the Mercury capsule, Americas first human-carrying spacecraft, were quite literally sketchy on details. Simple black-and-white graphics for public relations purposes predominated in an age when newspaper photos and illustrations typically were not printed in color. Even most televisions that dominated living rooms were still monochrome throughout most of the 1960s, although several nationally prominent glossy magazines did carry color content. Among them, LIFEproved crucial in portraying the (albeit idealized) lives of NASAs new Mercury astronauts in vivid color, while National Geographicmagazine commissioned brilliant artists, such as Pierre Mion and Davis Meltzer, to depict aspects of the emerging space adventure that no camera could ever hope to capture: godlike views of spacecraft and astronauts as if seen by a mysterious alien onlooker hovering some way outside the action.

Often the magazine materials and NASA press handouts overlapped because the same reliable corps of commercial artists with an eye for space subjects frequently made renderings for companies that were building the rocket hardware, as well as for the magazines presenting space-related stories for mass consumption. The first decent color cutaway of a Mercury capsule emerged not from NASA but from spacecraft fabricators McDonnell Douglas as part of its corporate literature, and then was widely disseminated to the pressusually in black-and-white. Promotion of the Gemini program also started out with rough visualizations, but by this point (the mid-1960s) in the so-called Moon Race, color was even more widely available on newsstands, and the medias appetite for handouts was insatiable. NASAs press departments, photo-processing labs, and graphics teams began operating on an industrial scale, making sure that American taxpayers were kept abreast of every tiny detail about the national space project. Partly this had to do with maintaining political support for a hugely expensive enterprise, but just as important, it was a way to express how open NASAs effort was in comparison with the secretive Soviet rocket program, which seldom released photos of anything more informative than cosmonauts smiling for official portraits.

Wings of desire

Rolf Kleps 1954 illustration (left) for Colliersmagazine of a reusable spaceplane atop a rocket designed by Wernher von Braun.

Apollos complex and eventful mission profile of launches, dockings, undockings, landings and takeoffs, rendezvous maneuvers, jettisoned modules, and parachuted splashdowns brought illustrative storytelling from NASA and its contractors to new levels of sophistication. As ever, the many visuals showed the intricate space ballets from a perspective outside the vehicles, as if from a vantage point where no human observer could possibly exist. By 1968, just as the real Apollo lunar flights were on the verge of launching, artists renderings had become highly detailed and technically accomplished. The Mercury days of explanatory labels glued unevenly onto photo prints of rough sketches were gone for good. Even when newspapers still demanded images that could be reproduced using just black ink, or duotone variations using shades of just one ink to create the illusion of greater color variation, some of the results, such as early Apollo ideas from the artist partnership of Ludwik iemba, and W. Collopy, or those created by Los Angeles Timesart director Russ Arasmith to explain the lunar mission profiles, needed no full-color embellishments to stand out as timeless masterpieces in their own right. Art played a role in the NASA story beyond the technically illustrative alone. In 1962, NASA chief administrator James Webb and Hereward Cooke of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., wrote letters of invitation to prominent artists, inviting them to tour NASA and create works based on their impressions. They were eloquent about the need for both art and science in any space endeavor. When a major rocket launch takes place, more than two hundred cameras record every split second of the activity,