I remember seeing these in some book when I was a kid... pre-internet... thanks for sharing.
Space Colony Art from the 1970s
81–90 of 135 posts
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#82What do they do with all the single use plastic containers?
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#83Is the cylinder design related to the Rama?
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#84I follow 70s Sci-Fi Art account on twitter for this kind of art https://twitter.com/70sscifiart
I often use some of the book cover art pictures as my phone wallpaper.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until Kennedy radically accelerated the schedule for the first moon landing and set that as a singular goal, the plans for the space program involved almost as much infrastructure building as exploration. Here's a 1955 television program where Wernher von Braun presents an earlier, more complicated plan for a Moon mission, complete with a nuclear-powered toroidal space station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIDFx7…
That's a great find. A noteworthy (to me) feature was the height of the orbit -- they're at ~1000 miles above the Earth's surface. This indicates that they were unaware of the Van Allen belts, which makes sense, in 1955, no artificial satellites had yet been launched. Edit: Also noticed the dramatized mission has a "free-return" trajectory, no maneuver required at the moon to get back to Earth.
They also had a lot of enthusiasm for nuclear energy. Apollo itself used fuel cells and the later space stations all used solar power.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool site! Just ordered an awesome poster of the star-birthing region in the Orion Nebula ( https://postercoop.com/posters/45/ ). Thanks for building and sharing your project.
From the description on that poster "The artist’s share of profits from sales of this poster will be donated to NASA." How, Though? You can't donate to NASA
Isn't NASA quite well funded already? Sky is the limit (or not..) of course, but I'd rather prefer a donation to those with immediate needs.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#87You mean retro Elisyum maybe :)
Also, how did we get from this cool stuff to zombie apocalypse, dystopian society and barren wastelands in our sci-fi?
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#88For more, you can check the artists websites. Don Davis: http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/allyours.html Rick Guidice: http://rickguidice.com/nasaart.html Roy Scarfo: http://www.royscarfo.com/
Sidenote: Rick Guidice also did art for Atari's gaming systems.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#89O’Neill cylinders were the template for space colonies in the Mobile Suit Gundam anime, going all the way back to the series premiere in 1979. One of many details which lent the show an air of gritty realism, despite its colorful giant robot fights.
They were also depicted quite faithfully and in great detail in Hideo Kojima's Policenauts.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#90How 'serious' were these pictures? Was this something they were seriously expecting in the coming years? I'm mindful of the fact that man had basically gone from just achieving orbit, to landing on the moon in a decade, so anything could have seemed possible at that stage.
I think they were serious, and very much a product of the malthusian ideas that dominated that era. I remember reading futurist books with these images in the 6th grade in the early 90s. Back in the 80s and 90s Malthusianism was the dominant thing. Most people believed the global population would keep expanding beyond what the world could sustain giving the impetus for things like space stations and ocean colonies. A…
Alas, the graphs from the 2010s continue to suggest that Malthusianism is true. Except that instead of running out of natural resources, we're running out of GHG budget.
Fortunately, nobody seriously believes that wasting trillions of dollars on moving a few people off the Earth is a serious solution to this problem. Unfortunately, nobody is actually pursuing any serious solutions to this problem.