Chesley Bonestell Space Art

Chesley Bonestell (1888 – 11 June 1986) is an famous space artist, designer, and illustrator. His paintings were a major influence on science fiction art and illustration, and he helped inspire the American Space Program. Below is a selection of space paintings by Chesley Bonestell.

Art Books: "The Art of Chesley Bonestell" by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III with Melvin Schuetz is a compilation of Chesley Bonestell's paintings. The book contains more than 300 illustrations, 200 in full color, and a full-length biography of the artist. "A Chesley Bonestell Space Art Chronology" contains well over 700 entries and is the definitive reference guide to publications containing Bonestell's space art. You can buy these books from Amazon.com please use the link below.

Note: All artwork and images copyright © Bonestell Space Art. No large images. Please contact Chesley Bonestell Space Art for queries or further information.

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All artwork © Bonestell Space Art

Chesley Bonestell was the father of modern space art. His paintings were a major influence on science fiction art and illustration, and he helped inspire the American space program. Artist and architect whose imaginative and technically authentic depictions of spacecraft and other worlds had a powerful effect on people in the decade before the start of the Space Age. His career spanned nearly a century, from his early architectural work on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler Building to his seminal contributions to the beginnings of the American space program. Bonestell inspired an entire generation of astronomers, artists, writers, engineers and visionaries with his remarkable paintings. Chesley Bonestell illustrated many pictorial books on astronomy & space flight during his career. Living to the age of 98, he saw the entire scope of manned flight, and himself influenced mankind's push into outer space. By then he had been honored internationally for the contribution he made to the birth of modern astronautics, from a bronze medal awarded by the British Interplanetary Society to a place in the International Space Hall of Fame to an asteroid named for him. His paintings are prized by collectors and institutions such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Collection of Fine Arts. Wernher von Braun, the leader of the German rocket team who had come to the U.S. after World War II: "Chesley Bonestell’s pictures ... present the most accurate portrayal of those faraway heavenly bodies that modern science can offer."

Official sites: Chesley Bonestell Space Art and The Chesley Bonestell Archives

Great scans from an old magazine article: Mr. Smith Goes to Venus. Illustrations by Chesley Bonestell. Coronet Magazine (1950).

Wikipedia: Chesley Bonestell

The Art of Chesley Bonestell
by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III with Melvin Schuetz

To order this book from Amazon.com, click here.

Book Description: The Art of Chesley Bonestell, by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durante, with a foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, showcases more than 300 drawings by the renowned architect and space artist, from illustrations of the chief engineer's plans for the Golden Gate Bridge (for the benefit of funders); to his favorite among his paintings, The Engulfed Cathedral A Fantasy; to his pre-space-travel lunar and Martian landscapes for magazines like Galaxy and Astounding.
From Publishers Weekly. © Cahners Business Information, Inc.

A Chesley Bonestell Space Art Chronology
by Melvin H. Schuetz

To order this book from Amazon.com, click here.

Book Description: A Chesley Bonestell Space Art Chronology is a 250-page book contains some 750 entries that catalog virtually every appearance in print of Bonestell's space art from 1944 to the present. The contents, among other things, include an essay on Bonestell by Ron Miller, a chronological biography compiled by Hulda Bonestell and Schuetz, and three indexes. This book is an invaluable resource for the Bonestell enthusiast and collector.
© Bonestell Space Art.

NASA Spider Space Station Concept

Description: A 1977 concept drawing for a space station. Known as the Spider concept, this station was designed to use Space Shuttle hardware. A solar array was to be unwound from the exhausted main fuel tank. The structure could then be formed and assembled in one operation. The main engine tank would then be used as a space operations control center, a Shuttle astronaut crew habitat, and a space operations focal point for missions to the Moon and Mars.

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If you want to download Hi-Res images, click the link: Spider Space Station Concept. GRIN - Great Images in NASA.

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For more information about history space station concepts check out the Space Station Concepts of the 1970's.

Fortress on a Skyhook

Fortress on a Skyhook (Mechanix Illustrated. Apr, 1949): The U.S. is working on plans for a satellite base...

Scans: Fortress on a Skyhook

All Aboard for Outer Space!

All Aboard for Outer Space! (Mechanix Illustrated. Jan, 1956): Is this the ship that will take us to earth’s first manned satellite?

Scans: All Aboard for Outer Space!

Sanger-Bredt Antipodal Bomber

Most people can tell you that the Germans were developing some weird aircraft during the World War II. The German Antipodal Bomber (or Silverbird) was one of these. A revolutionary rocket-powered aircraft, it was designed for supersonic, stratospheric flight capable of striking targets anywhere in the world, that proposed Dr. Eugen Sanger and Irena Bredt in the late 1930s. In 1944 the Antipodal Bomber became one of chosen concepts to bring a "Miracle Weapon" to the USA (it was only one of the Amerika Bomber project). The design was a significant one, as it incorporated new rocket technology and spaceplane concept ideas. In the end, it was considered too complex and expensive to produce. After the war ended, the Sanger-Bredt design formed the basis for major development projects in the 1950-60s (X-20 Dyna-Soar in the US and Keldysh Bomber in the USSR), but these were cancelled.

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© Vadim Lukashevich / Buran.ru.


© Josha Hildwine / Luft Art images.

For more information check out the following sources:

Silbervogel / Wikipedia.

Sanger Amerika Bomber / Luft '46.

Amerika Bomber project by E. Saenger and J. Bredt, August 1944. (PDF)

Apollo 9 Art by Russell Arasmith

Beautiful drawings by artist Russell Arasmith. These were used by NASA to illustrate the Apollo 9 Mission.

Note: All artwork and images copyright © Russell Arasmith. Please do not use images without the permission.

Source: Apollo Mission Control Photo Plus

Gallery: Apollo 9 Art by Russell Arasmith

Space in the 1980s and 1990s

Illustrated history: Space Stations and Manned Spaceflight in the 1980s and 1990s

The History of Space Art

Artwork © Bonestell Space Art

Long before the first Sputnik circled the earth in 1957, a certain breed of artists, inspired by astronomical discoveries, adopted the whole cosmos as their muse. Like artists re-creating the world of the dinosaurs, these painters revelled in the challenge of combining their latest scientific findings with their own creativity.

Even the most realistic portrait artist, if he's creative, brings a vivid imagination to his studio, along with paints and brushes. The goal of the artist is to look at reality, to form a personal impression of it, and to develop the skills necessary to render the impression in objective terms. The artist is constantly weighing the photographic rendering of reality against the recreation he can construct through his own imagination. And the balance he selects between naturalism and imagination often becomes the artist's identifiable style.

The artist is normally allowed great latitude in his adherence to reality. Yet there is one category of art in which departures from reality oppose the purpose of the art. The purpose is to visualize a part of reality which is "unseeable", and the person who does this is the scientific artist. The two sciences which the scientific artist pursues are paleontology and astronomy. Both sciences need to have their subject matter visualized in realistic, concrete terms--not just laboratory symbols and other mumbo-jumbo.

The astronomical artist of the last few decades had as much to do with the success of the space effort as any technical advance. Just as early American artists showed the public views of the unconquered West and helped propel interest in exploration and expansion (as artists of vision and realistic imagination always point the way), so too, astronomical artists have shown the public what the unseen planets, moons, comets, and distant reaches of the galaxy might look like when we are able to be there in person.

The first space art appeared in 1865 with the illustrations by Emile Bayard and A. de Neuvill for Jules Verne's novel, From the Earth to the Moon. There had been imaginary views of other worlds, and even of space flight before this. But until Verne's book appeared, these views all had been heavily colored by mysticism rather than science. The illustrations accompanying From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, A Trip Around the Moon, were the first artistic impressions of space ever created strictly according to scientific fact. For these books, Verne even had a lunar map specially drawn by Beer and Maedlerm, the leading selenographers of the day.

In 1874, James Nasmyth and James Carpenter published the classic study of the earth's satellite, The Moon. A large and lavishly illustrated volume, its numerous plates were reproduction of photographs of plaster models of portions of the lunar surface, seen both telescopically from Earth and as they would appear to an observer on the Moon.

During and immediately following the turn of the century, many popular books on astronomy were published and illustrated with space art. The most outstanding illustrator of such books, Lucien Rudaux, was also the first genuine astronomical artist. Rudaux (1874-1947) was both an artist and a professional astronomer. He wrote and illustrated a number of texts, such as the authoritative (and still in print) Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy.

Other important artists of the early part of this century are: Scriven Bolton, Abbe Moreux, Howard Russell Butler, Frank R. Paul, Rockwell Kent, and Charles Schneeman. They published their art in many popular journals and newspapers such as The Illustrated London News , Science and Invention, Amazing, Life, Astounding, and National Geographic.

Astronomical art blossomed after the 1950s. In the years immediately before and following the launch of Sputnik I (1957), the space art that appeared in magazines such as Collier's, This Week, and Coronet, and in books , such as The Conquest of Space and Arthur C. Clarke's Exploration of Space (art by Ralph A. Smith), helped convince the public that space exploration was far from a fantasy and that it was well within the reach of contemporary science and engineering. Beyond the question of hardware, realistic and accurate painting of other worlds showed that the moons and planets were not as insubstantial as fuzzy astronomical photographs made them seem, but were genuine worlds in their own right.

Modern space artists have both an easier and, at the same time, more difficult job than the space artists of a generation ago. More discoveries have been made about the nature of our neighboring planets in the last decade than in all the previous history of astronomy. Contemporary artists certainly have more factual material to draw upon, yet this abundance also limits them. We know what the surface of Mars looks like now--there is far less leeway for the artist's own imagination. The phrase "artist's impression" attached to a space painting no longer means an imaginary guess.

From Space Art: Starlog Photo Guidebook, by Ron Miller, 1978. "The Archeology of Space Art".

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Wikipedia: The Cosmos contains many sources of visual inspiration that our growing abilities to gather and propagate has spread through the mass culture. Space Art is a general term for art emerging from knowledge and ideas associated with outer space, both as a source of inspiration and as a means for visualizing and promoting space travel. Whatever the stylistic path, the artist is generally attempting to communicate ideas somehow related to space, often including appreciation of the infinite variety and vastness which surrounds us.

Space artists may work closely with space scientists and engineers to help them to visualize and develop their scientific and technological concepts making the dream of space exploration a reality. Other forms of pictorial space art bring the viewer to inner visions inspired directly or otherwise by the fruits of the expanding vision of Humanity. Some aspects of such art pay visual homage to outer space, popular ideas of life on other worlds including alien visitation visions, dream symbology, psychedelic imagery and other influences on contemporary visionary art.

Wikipedia: Space Art