ASTRONAUTICS IS UNIQUE AMONG THE sciences in that it is the only study to have begun its existence as pure fantasy. For centuries it lived only in the works of fiction writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and of scientists, swayed by them, who believed in as patently unlikely a proposition as flying into space. Just as authors’ descriptions of alien worlds and spacecraft had a very real influence on the history and development of astronautics—where would we be had the fathers of rocketry, Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, not read science fiction?—so too did the work of a painter named Chesley Bonestell. At a time before the Mariner probe, the Explorer satellites, and the Mercury program, when the photographs of cosmic objects taken through land-based telescopes were blurry at best, Bonestell painted photorealistic scenes of planets and spacecraft that were more than skillful fantasies. They were scrupulously researched and scientifically accurate and, until we actually sent men into space, by far the best representations we had.

Bonestell (pronounced Bon-es-tell) grew up in San Francisco, where he was born on New Year’s Day, 1888. As a youth, he read any astronomy book he could find. He also was an avid painter, and after graduating from high school at 16 and going to work in his family’s paper business, he took art classes at night. His two passions merged in 1905, when, on a visit to San Jose’s Lick Observatory, he looked at Saturn through the 12-inch refracting telescope and was so amazed by its beauty that he rushed home to paint what he had seen. That first space painting, along with everything he had painted since childhood, was destroyed in the fires that followed the great earthquake of 1906.

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