Lunar exploration in the old-school heroic way: Fred Freeman made this piece of artwork for First Men to the Moon, a realistic moon-flight novel by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, published in 1960. I read the book in a Swedish translation in 1966 or 1967, but I only retain three fragmentary memories of its two astronauts’ troubled voyage to the Moon and back.
Space That Never Was is an art project by illustrator Mac Rebisz. The goal is to make technologically accurate depictions of space missions that could have been executed if the US/Soviet space race had continued for another decade at the hectic pace of the late 1960s, with manned expeditions to Mars and beyond.
The Soviet moon landing depicted above (click on the picture for a larger version) was on the way around 1970 and the one-man lander would have looked like that. However, the endeavor foundered because of insoluble problems with its huge N-1 rocket.
Read more about Mac’s project and view his “space history” paintings here — link >>>
Yesterday I had a nice author interview. The Swedish teacher in my youngest daughter’s class had instructed the students to write an essay about an author. So my daughter decided to write about the one she knows best, i.e. science fiction & fantasy author Anders Blixt. She therefore interviewed me for half an hour about my books The Ice War and Spiran och Staven and what inspires me to write. I spoke a lot about my memories of the Balkan War in 1990s, Afghanistan in 2008, the Apollo project in my childhood and other sources of inspiration.
The British Interplanetary Society, a scholarly organization whose most famous member ought to have been the late Sir Arthur C Clarke, started studying how to carry out a manned landing on the moon already before World War Two. Their approach was realistic and it appears that their technical studies came as close to the mark as was possible with the knowledge available in those days. After all, nobody predicted the semiconductor revolution that appeared soon after the war’s end; it transformed all types of advanced technology.
Illustrator BA Smith did some artwork based on those studies. Now a group of present-day illustrator have used his works to do some nice 3D renderings. The result: great-looking retro-technology. Space travel as it ought to have been, Read more here — link >>>
Johann-Dietrich Woerner, Director-General of the European Space Agency (ESA), wants to establish a human village on the far side of the moon. Its purpose: astronomic research and the development of technologies for interplanetary spaceflight. “The Americans are looking to go to Mars very soon – and I don’t see how we can do that – before going to Mars we should test what we could do on Mars on the Moon,” says Dr Woerner.
Read more here — link >>> .
Wanderers is a short science fiction film by Erik Wernquist, a digital artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He explains its underlying idea:
The film is a vision of our humanity’s future expansion into the Solar System. Although speculative, the visuals in the film are based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. All locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.