Space travel was a dream for artists long before Armstrong stepped on moon

For centuries, the dream of human travel into the cosmos has fired imaginations.

In the midst of the space race, Hereward Lester Cooke, the former co-director of the NASA Art Program, observed, “Space travel started in the imagination of the artist.”

If the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing is an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable technological achievement, it’s also a good time to reflect on the creative vision that made it possible.

Long before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, artists and writers were crafting visions of extraterrestrial exploration that would make space flight possible.

Cultivating possibility

For centuries, the dream of human travel into the cosmos has fired imaginations.

Ancient mythologies teemed with deities who suffused the skies, glimmered from stars and rode the Sun and Moon. Pythagoras, Philolaus and Plutarch each contemplated the Moon as a world of its own. Leonardo da Vinci famously imagined flying machines that would take their occupants skyward. Authors such as Cyrano de Bergerac – who’s credited with being the first to imagine a rocket being used for space travel – fed a growing appetite for stories of celestial exploration.

In 1865, the French writer Jules Verne published his novel, “From Earth to the Moon,” followed five years later by its sequel, “Round the Moon.”

Verne’s tale provides an uncannily prescient account of the development of space travel: Three astronauts blast off from Florida in a small aluminum capsule, fired from the end of an enormous cast iron gun. After orbiting the Moon and making observations with a pair of opera glasses, the three men return to Earth, splashing into the ocean as heroes.

Almost a century later, RKO Pictures would release a film inspired by Verne’s adventure story, while a comic book version of the tale went through multiple printings between 1953 and 1971.

In the 1950s, the painter Chesley Bonestell further stoked the imagination of future space-farers with his visions of space stations, published in Collier’s. Walt Disney would follow with three made-for-TV movies that illustrated the ways people might one day be able to fly into space and land on the Moon.

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