If
Robert McCall is the star of the space artists, then Chesley Bonestell
is the Dean of all Space Artists. In fact, many of the current crop of
space artists will tell you that Bonestell was a major influence on
their career and their work in the genre.
While Bonestell was well known for his work imagining the landscape of our Moon and planets within our Solar System, he was also noted for his work during the early years of space flight research.
"CONQUEST OF SPACE" by Willy Ley was illustrated by Bonestell and proved to be a seminal work that provided the layman of the 1950s with a serious understanding of the possible future of space travel.

Bonestell was involved in painting space flight subjects throughout the 1940s and in 1947 sent a series of painted studies to PIC magazine for a proposed article on space flight in the future. The article told the story through paintings of a ballistic transcontinental rocket trip from New York to San Francisco in less than an hour.
The story was titled "Coast to Coast in 40 Minutes" and was published in October, 1947, just ten years to the month before Sputnik was launched into orbit.
In 2007, I was able to procure the entire series of finished studies that Bonestell had sent to PIC magazine pitching his article on a passenger rocket flight from coast to coast. The report was based upon Tsien Hsue-Shen's (one of the founders of JPL and later became the Father of Chinese Rocketry) theory on space flight into the edge of space.

Bonestell even wrote a basic description in his architecturally trained handwriting of what each work represented on the base of each painting. In the case of this first painting in the series of a passenger rocket lifting off in at 7:00PM in the evening from a launch site near New York City. Bonestell used his vast knowledge of architectural rendering and matte painting to meticulously show Manhattan Island, the surrounding boroughs of New York and New Jersey coast with the rocket in the foreground on the beginning of its westward journey.

Bonestell continues his narrative for the PIC magazine publishers in that architecturally tight printing .



One interesting note about these paintings is the lack of clouds. This was a time before weather satellites or any real photographs of the Earth taken from space. Bonestell based his knowledge of the Earth's atmospheric effects on his observations of cloudless days.



Now what was the reason used in the PIC Magazine story for this remarkable journey? A cocktail appointment! One of our passengers had dinner with with someone in New York at 6:00PM and planned to meet with someone else for cocktails at 5:00PM. Was it business? Was it a second date? Unfortunately, the article never tells us. We can only let our imaginations guide us as to the real reason for a trip from coast to coast in 40 minutes.
__________________________________________________________

Bonestell noted on the back of these paintings which works were used in that initial treaty on Man's journey into space. The above scan shows the back of the first painting in the series. There Bonestell writes, in script, the name of article, the magazine and the edition date and states that this painting was "also reused as Plate I, CONQUEST OF SPACE."
Chesley would go on to note that paintings 2,3 and 6 would be reused as Plates III, IVa and IVb in "CONQUEST OF SPACE."
This series of works by Bonestell were used in one of the first published articles by the artist as well as included in one of the most important early books on space travel for the general public ever written.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like to acknowledge Melvin Schuetz and Ron Miller for alerting me to this rare series of Bonestell paintings and for providing me with much information about Chesley Bonestell and his art.
Comments